Governance of Wine with respect to the Software Freedom Conservancy (update October 2011)

[Michael Curran]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Juan Lang <juan.lang at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
>> Not that I have any problems with our benevolent overlords, and not
>> that I would likely achieve franchise with a scant 2 patches under my
>> belt, but I can't help wondering how such a revolt would succeed
>> seeing as the only method to achieve franchise-hood is controlled by
>> the same people one would be revolting against.
>
> You are new around here, we bottom-post ;)
>
> Not true, of course.  Alexandre is at the top of the list of
> contributors, naturally, but he doesn't constitute a controlling
> majority.  (I'm discounting Jeremy's contributions, which is correct
> within tolerable error <snarky grin>.)
> --Juan
>
My bad, gmail makes it easy to make that mistake. ;)

As I said, our overlords are kind and benevolent and I'm sure that the
mention of "evil plans" was simply a joke as such wise and noble
developers could need harbor a malevolent thought. But, unless I've
been misreading this mailing list, all patches have to go through our
current enlightened leader before becoming part of the patch count in
the wine tree. Not that the powers that be are susceptible to
temptation, but lesser mortals might find that being more selective
about whose patches are accepted during periods of discontent as an
easy way to influence such a vote. Likewise, even if such a mortal
didn't give into temptation, if the usurpers lose the vote they could
always claim such impropriety did take place.

I only bring it up because tempers tend to run pretty hot over topics
like ousting a project's leadership in open revolt and the last thing
you want is the losing side posting ream after ream of git commit logs
trying to show to that several of their supporters should have
received franchise, but their patches were blocked to prevent it.

Rules like that should be designed to end a conflict with creating new
sources of it.
.