Re: The General Public Licence (GPL) as the basic governance tool

[Andreas R.]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2020 at 10:04:36PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

>> We have never pressed contributors to endorse the GNU Project philosophy [..]
>> people are welcome to contribute to GNU regardless of their views.
> 
> The GNU Social Contract is about changing that. 

So who is going to maintain Emacs?

> The goal has always been to have as many maintainers as possible on board.

One of the first acts of gnu.tools as a makeshift GNU shadow-government 
was to insist on the name of the document, alienating maintainers who were
not, in principle, opposed to the document's existence. This has been
pointed out.

> The document was drafted on this list, with a call for an additional
> feedback period.  

The document was published on this list. It was drafted by a select
group of people outside of GNU.

> We can discuss the pros and cons of different governance models

So far that has been troublesome. Any suggestion or feedback regarding
the current governance model has not led to any productive discussion.

> Now, I do think there is value in having maintainers endorse the Social
> Contract, regardless of the governance model one is aiming for: 

I think when it comes to the gnu.tools initiative, at this point becoming 
accepting of various governance models is a bit late; since its inception
it has pushed towards a very particular model of governance.

> it can improve cohesion 

It can, but so far it hasn't noticably succeeded in that aim.

> and allow for more delegation of responsibilities.

As I understand it, governance about GNU packages has been devolved 
entirely to their respective maintainers except for matters of software 
freedom. The only things left to delegate are:

- Autonomy regarding the definition of software freedom

- Having input into how other maintainers should run their projects

I don't see how delegating either of these will benefit the GNU
project.

        thanks,
        Andreas R.