Bruce Perens rejected from license-proliferation committee.

Kevin Bedell kevin at kbedell.com
Mon Aug 22 16:12:06 UTC 2005


If you want people to believe you make good decisions then let them watch you as
you make them.  Telling people you have a good board and that they make good
decisions is inevitablly less effective than simply letting them watch and
judge for themselves.

Quoting Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com>:

> You and that army.  When Martin Fink and I sat down in February to
> discuss the structure of the solution, he and I were firm in the
> belief that the committee should be strictly limited in membership.  I
> haven't changed my mind in that regard.  If Martin has, I might be led
> to change mine.  Maybe you should ask him?

You and Martin sitting down together probably leads to good decisions being
made. However, it is less effective in communicating the reasons for those
decisions and building concensus within the community than you and Martin
conducting that conversation in public on the mailing list.

I'm not saying you and Martin ar wrong. But I am saying that the fall out from
private decision is that the community trusts those decisions less. This
conversation/thread is clear evidence of that.

I think this is especially true since so many of us have experience with open
source projects where all decisions are done via mailing list and the decision
making *is* transparent. Asking the community to settle for less is bound to
lead to these discussions.










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