Re: [gentoo-nfp] [RFC] Alternative methods for determining 'interest in Foundation affairs'

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 4:35 PM Brad Teaford Cowan
<bradly.cowan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> First of all, the foundation was formed in
> defense of the exact situation that Gentoo is facing now, as a control
> buffer keeping certain developers from literally taking over every
> aspect of the distro for their own gain.

This seems really odd to me.  I don't think there are any signs that a
very small number of devs have an unusual amount of control at the
moment.  Over the last few years we've had a reasonable amount of
turnover in both the Council and the Trustees.  Sure, we have devs who
are more active than others in making proposals, and so on, but these
generally require approval by others.  To the extent that a few key
team leads have more significant influence, their decisions almost
always can be appealed.

Ironically the Foundation Trustees are the weaker link historically
when it comes to having a small number of people able to "take over."
At one point we only had 3 Trustees I think, and I believe two of
those disappeared.  At that point our one remaining Trustee could have
probably just set himself up as benevolent dictator if desired, and
there was actually talk at the time about moving to that model
(drobbins offered to take the role as I recall - IMO without any ill
intent).  Now, at no point did anybody do anything "bad" as far as I'm
aware, but I'm just saying that it could have happened.  This is
simply because we don't have a lot of people interested in Foundation
work.  After this crisis more people stepped up to try to prevent his
from happening, and since then we've always been able to keep the
seats fairly full, though we've still struggled with the housekeeping.

In any case, I don't really see how the Foundation can really operate
as some kind of check because to the degree that the Foundation has
some kind of ultimate control, anybody who wanted to do something
"bad" could just take over the Foundation, and it would basically
involve the exact same work they would have to do to take over the
Council, except for which group they'd need to get representatives
onto.  The voting pools for the two substantially overlap.  In the
unlikely event of some kind of total breakdown between the developers
and foundation members you'd basically have one group that does all
the work and the other which owns the name and servers, and you'd
probably just end up with a fork under a new name using minimal/free
infra until that all got sorted out.  Again, that is hypothetical and
pretty unlikely, especially right now, in my opinion.

-- 
Rich