Re: Turning GNU into a bottom-up organization

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Mark,

Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org> skribis:

> Information For Maintainers of GNU Software:
>   https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/
>
> GNU Coding Standards:
>   https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/
>
> For the basic ideas of GNU and Free Software:
>   https://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html
>   https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
>   https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
>   https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html
>   https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
>   https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
>   https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html
>   https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
>
> There are a lot of shoulds, but very little musts in those documents.
> Which is good, because the amount of information is really a lot. And
> it gives GNU maintainers a lot of freedom to implement the suggested
> policies and decide what does or doesn't apply in the specific
> (technical) context of a package. But it takes a lot of time to
> describe the responsibilities, delegation and decision frameworks for a
> package to bring in more people who can share the maintainer load. It
> would be good to try to distill a small core of musts, a summary of
> sorts, that can be more easily communicated as a kind of social
> contract for GNU.

I agree.  I think in practice many (most?) maintainers not only agree to
uphold the free software values, but also share them.

To make that clearer, having some sort of a “social contract” for
maintainers to sign, where they explicitly commit to defending a
specified set of core values of the project, would be great.  It would
make it easier to share overarching responsibilities among maintainers
because they’d have explicitly committed to furthering the project’s
missions.

Thoughts?

Thanks for starting this discussion!

Ludo’.