[ox-en] Re: What's wrong with powerful maintainers?
- From: Christian Siefkes <christian siefkes.net>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:36:14 +0200
Hi Stefan, hi all,
Stefan Merten wrote:
7 months (219 days) ago Christian Siefkes wrote:
But for the other aspects,
smaller and more specialized projects seem preferable, since the internal
organization of a huge project might become difficult and bureaucratic, and
the maintainers or admins of a huge project could become disturbingly
influential in regard to the goal setting process.
[...]
In the first quote you basically say that powerful maintainers "could
become disturbingly influential in regard to the goal setting
process".
[...]
For me a maintainer is not really different from other contributors.
S/he does a work needed by the project and as a maintainer he has no
alienated reasons for this work and so always acts in the best
interest of the goals of the project - at least ideally. In practice
this is enforced by the checks and balances you gave. Of course a main
question are the goals of the project but defininig different goals to
me more looks like a case for a fork.
Now I don't understand why in your opinion a maintainer "could become
disturbingly influential in regard to the goal setting process". What
can be disturbing? May be you can come up with an example?
Well, my main point in this context was that projects tend to be specific
about goals. Even a very large project such as the Wikipedia has one
specific goal ("produce an encyclopedia"), not thousands of them ("produce
<insert thousand different things>"). The reasons I give (project could
bureaucratic, maintainers could become too powerful) are speculations (and
maybe quite unnecessary ones) about _why_ different goals tend to be pursued
by separate projects, rather than by a single huge one.
Best regards
Christian
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