Definition of Open Source [was Re: pine: UW permission to distribute]

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:01:40 -0500, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
> Good point.  (-:  At least he did mention some sort of concensus reached
> by redhat folk, even though it's not documented anywhere.

I'm going to beat a dead horse for a second, to make a point.

He said there was discussion, he did not say consensous had been
reached in the discussion which is a subtle but important distinction.
If the current draft of fedora leadership page is to be believed and
censensous is to be the way that decisions are made by leadership, its
going to be vitally important that consensous decisions that are
agreed on get written down in a formalized way to distinquish the
discussion that continue to be open-ended and have not come to an
agreed apun resolution. Consensous doesn't mean unanimous, it implies
compromise so depending on which discussion participant you ask, you
can get a very different view of where an on-going discussion is
leaning. So its a very good idea to make delibrate effort to write
down what is agreed on as policy ( with references back to the
discussion that was held if possible) compiled all in one location
seperate from the discussion forum...even trivial matters like the
agreed on definition of open source.

This is especially important when the small consensous making group is
discussion/making policy that a larger group is going to be trying to
interpret and abide by, as is the case of the larger community
developer pool who will be using fedora extras to maintain packages
in.  If leadership has to continually re-clarify the consensous
decision to new community members who disagree with veteran community
members, thats a waste of leaderships valuable time and prevents
community from establishing its own mentoring processes of new
volunteers.

-jef"join me on the fedora-royal-degrees mailinglist to see what
policy decisions i make everyday concerning what color of the sky I
will allow"spaleta