Re: [9fans] Governance question???

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Mon, 14 May 2012 15:05:56 +0200
Aram Hăvărneanu <aram.h@mgk.ro> wrote:

> Plan 9 is a research platform for programmers, not a product. As such,
> your questions don't make sense. Everybody maintains their private
> trees because this is the way the system is supposed to be used. Plan
> 9 has a philosophy, but not a direction. There's no single roadmap. At
> least not anymore.

I think this is the clearest thing I've ever read on the state and
governance of Plan 9, but at the end of the day somebody does rule what
does and does not go into the iso, and that has a very strong influence
on the system as a whole. As far as I'm aware that somebody is usually
Geoff.

A comparison with 9front might be interesting. Governance played some
role in 9front forking from Plan 9. (Not as big a role as I may have
stated in the past, my apologies to everyone who saw that.) I'm tempted
to call 9front a military junta, but really the person who gets the
most say is the person with the most time and ability to contribute
code. The 9front community is a funny place. Insults fly like swarming
bees but as soon as some idea comes up which doesn't look ridiculous at
first glance they get stuck right in, a lot of discussion happens. Same
for bug fixing.

> Legal issues in the project? Unlike a particularly successful free
> software project, the Plan 9 community cares about code and not about
> licensing.

Ditto for 9front, although they have replaced the fonts which were
licensed "for distribution with Plan 9 only." Even this wasn't solely
license-oriented; they cleaned up the font size numbering while they
were at it.

I think the 9front crowd cares about being a community and having one
central tree with all the fixes and even all the features which meet
their standards. There is certainly a latent disdain for the way
desirable things may be lost in the forest of contrib. What their
standards are is harder for me to say but they hate things which
complexify the base system, such as nix's application-core feature.