Ideally we would have something that’s more dehierarchized, but until someone figures out how to do that, all open source repositories have a group of maintainers (or some other name for those who have commit access) who need to (individually) approve of contributions. As it stands, open source is indeed shared effort, but shared effort that has to be approved by a member of a cabal. There’s a reason stewards are often called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life (which is indeed a slightly different concept, but hopefully you get my point that chief maintainers have lasting influence and power).
It’s still much better than other levels (i.e. proprietary). When maintainers slog behind community PRs and wishes for too long and/or persistently screw them up, a critical mass of users leaving will build for alternatives created, accelerated by the fact that most of your project’s users are going to be enthusiasts accustomed to switching and upholding open source principles.
In summary, yes, maintainers make decisions to make users (or some shared vision) happy and are supposed to backtrack when enough of the users object. This is true whether the change is antagonistic or not. What you said in your first paragraph is the opposite of that. (I guess my initial question was what do you think should be the reason to backtrack other than users aren’t happy. “Users are hurt” is the same thing as “Users aren’t happy”.)
As for Audacity? It’s been four years with no attempts, so Tenacity doesn’t look like it’s going to pick up momentum. Until the next incident, Users won’t believe they’re being screwed (and I agree with them) and aren’t building that critical mass. (I also object that the opt-in telemetry PR was antagonistic.)
My issue is that corporate folk behind this attempted to do this. IMHO, the stewardship of the project is all wrong, and the motives questionable. It did feel like you were defending their actions. Corporate influence is not a defining aspect of open source for me. Its an unfortunate problem that ultimately leads to the true dilemma. Open source is about sharing and giving your time freely, corporate goals is how can we profit from our position in this project.
Ideally we would have something that’s more dehierarchized, but until someone figures out how to do that, all open source repositories have a group of maintainers (or some other name for those who have commit access) who need to (individually) approve of contributions. As it stands, open source is indeed shared effort, but shared effort that has to be approved by a member of a cabal. There’s a reason stewards are often called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life (which is indeed a slightly different concept, but hopefully you get my point that chief maintainers have lasting influence and power).
It’s still much better than other levels (i.e. proprietary). When maintainers slog behind community PRs and wishes for too long and/or persistently screw them up, a critical mass of users leaving will build for alternatives created, accelerated by the fact that most of your project’s users are going to be enthusiasts accustomed to switching and upholding open source principles.
In summary, yes, maintainers make decisions to make users (or some shared vision) happy and are supposed to backtrack when enough of the users object. This is true whether the change is antagonistic or not. What you said in your first paragraph is the opposite of that. (I guess my initial question was what do you think should be the reason to backtrack other than users aren’t happy. “Users are hurt” is the same thing as “Users aren’t happy”.)
As for Audacity? It’s been four years with no attempts, so Tenacity doesn’t look like it’s going to pick up momentum. Until the next incident, Users won’t believe they’re being screwed (and I agree with them) and aren’t building that critical mass. (I also object that the opt-in telemetry PR was antagonistic.)
My issue is that corporate folk behind this attempted to do this. IMHO, the stewardship of the project is all wrong, and the motives questionable. It did feel like you were defending their actions. Corporate influence is not a defining aspect of open source for me. Its an unfortunate problem that ultimately leads to the true dilemma. Open source is about sharing and giving your time freely, corporate goals is how can we profit from our position in this project.