Hello, Am Mittwoch, 5. September 2018, 00:21:34 CEST schrieb Jim Henderson:
On Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:40:29 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Another thing that comes to mind when voting is public, is that ( also from experience ) there's a fair chance that the community will not discuss board decicions, but the voting behaviour of it's individual members.
Which is fine. If the community doesn't feel like a member of the board is properly representing their interests or delivering on their campaign promises or stated goals for running for the board, that would seem to be a fair discussion for the community to have, no?
That's a tricky question - whatever I answer will paint me into a corner ;-) You _and_ Gertjan have good arguments, but sadly we can't have both ways at the same time. Maybe my answer below will at least ensure that I paint myself into the green corner ;-)
Like I said, default to being open, except for cases where not being open is specifically warranted (and can be noted in the notes - like "discussed dismissal of problematic member of the project; voted and decided to take action. Specific information withheld for third party privacy reasons."
As I said, we see this in LKML on occasion - with the Spectre and Meltdown exploits is the most obvious example. That group defaults to being open with their information except when they can't due to third party privacy reasons (Intel's in those instances) or to follow responsible disclosure policies.
There's a "little" difference between keeping technical issues private vs. keeping board topics/discussions which often involve humans private. (Hint: The reason for keeping the Spectre exploits/patches private is _not_ to protect the humans who designed the "broken" CPU.)
But the policy doesn't prohibit Linus calling another developer a moron for doing something that he (Linus) feels was a stupid thing to do and calling attention to bad decisions made by developers on the team.
I've only read a few of Linus' rants, but most of those I've read were beyond our guiding principles, so Linus might be at risk of receiving a formal warning if he ever posts such a rant on an openSUSE mailinglist ;-) Yes, I can imagine that lots of people, including the press, might have lots of fun reading such a warning, and the one sending it will probably end up in a funny[tm] shitstorm ;-) Back to the topic: Complaining about bad code is of course [more than] ok, but it should be done without personal attacks ("this code is bad" vs. "you are an idiot")
What's more, while that does make the press when it happens, it doesn't break the development process. The argument has been made that that policy has made for a stronger kernel, not a weaker one.
I'm sure there are more friendly ways to reach that "better kernel" goal ;-)
I would argue that the same thing is true here - having the board be open about the things that they vote on makes the board stronger, not weaker.
I'll give you two answers on this ;-) 1) Personally, I don't have a problem with making my votes public, even if a specific vote might be unpopular or in hindsight turn out to be wrong. 2) The problem is that making my votes public also means you can guess (or even know, if I'm the "1" in a "5:1" vote) how the other board members voted. I understand the arguments of those board members who think that having the votes public would come with side effects (like voting for what people will like instead of what makes sense, or discussions about the voting behaviour while "ignoring" the board decision). Making my own votes public would basically mean to make the votes of the other board members public, and I won't do that to the other board members unless they agree with making it public, or I think the other's votes were completely stupid ;-) (which, BTW, never happened yet) For now, I'll do a similar offer as Simon already did - if you want to know how I voted on something, ask me in a private mail, and I'll probably answer ;-)
But what I'm hearing (no disrespect to any of the board here) is that the board doesn't think the membership can "handle the truth".
I think we are more than capable of handling that information.
Agreed on that, but IMHO you are looking at the wrong problem ;-) The (IMHO) real problem is that you'll often only know "half of the truth" because we have to keep some aspects private, or simply because the summary in the meeting minutes doesn't include every little detail. (A board meeting usually takes an hour, which is much longer than the minutes which you can read in 3, well, minutes.) Of course you can always ask for more details to get a fuller picture [1], and we'll provide these details whenever possible - which also means that sometimes that won't be possible. Damn, did I painted myself into the middle of the room now while carefully avoiding all corners? ;-) Since the topic is not clearly black or white, I'm not even surprised... Regards, Christian Boltz [1] I'm intentionally not saying "the full picture" here, because that's not always as easy as it might sound. -- "Lege die eine Hand in die Gefriertruhe und die andere auf eine heiße Herdplatte. Im Durchschnitt ist das dann ein angenehmes Gefühl." [so erklärt mein Lehrer den "Durchschnitt"] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org