[License-discuss] The political / technical dichotomy

[Richard Fontana]

I have a different concern that goes to the political nature of
license proposals. If the submitter is responsible for maintaining the
PEP document, how can bias be avoided or minimized in the content of
the document? Even if one relies on a non-submitter volunteer somehow,
in many cases third-party observers are far from neutral.

(I happen to trust *VanL* to do a good job of hypothetically
maintaining a PEP document for CAL, but that's because I've seen over
the years that VanL is unusually receptive to acknowledging and
considering alternate points of view. :)

Richard

On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 7:09 PM Chris Jerdonek <chris.jerdonek at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 3:55 PM Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:
>>
>> We should keep this in mind as we consider processes like PEP. They are designed to create consensus, and their subject has mainly been technical issues where consensus is easier to form. Just how will they handle a failure to achieve consensus?
>
>
> Python's PEP process definitely isn't designed to create consensus and doesn't claim to reach consensus. For example, Python's relatively recent PEP 572 ("Assignment expressions") from a year ago was highly contentious--
> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572/
> Some informal polls at the time indicated that an extremely high percentage of core developers (something like on the order of 90%, IIRC) were opposed to the PEP, and yet it was adopted. This is because Python was using the BDFL model at the time. (Now Python is using a 5-member steering council process to make decisions.) So the way of deciding on a proposal is separate from the format of the PEP document itself. OSI can use whatever method it wants (voting?).
>
> The PEP format is largely a documentation issue. It doesn't say anything to the effect that all objections need to be accommodated. Rather, they just need to be documented for posterity, with an explanation of why the objection was rejected.
>
> --Chris
>
>
>>
>>
>>     Thanks
>>
>>     Bruce
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