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Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Ned Sliderned@unixmail.co.uk wrote:
R P Herrold wrote:
On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, Marcus Moeller wrote:
<snip everything>
The bit that causes all the confusion here is the "C" in the name CentOS. It would all be so much clearer if the project would just rename to EntOS because that's what it is.
I guess the "Community" bit refers to the community of users, nothing more.
The word Community has multiple definitions and is usually what the people living in it want. A community can be a commune or a dictatorship of the meritocrit. Its rules do not have to be democratic or even open to outsiders (or insiders who are not 'blessed') And a community does not mean that anyone who 'moves in' are automatically part of the community.
+1
I think you've totally hit the nail square on the proverbial head with this post Smooge. ;)
A community is nothing more than a group of individuals congregating together for whatever particular purpose they choose to be in such a group, and does not specify the manner in which the group is organized, governed, managed, etc.
As you state, labelling a group as a "community" certainly does not imply or require that group to be an elected democracy, nor does it imply that "everyone's opinion counts equally" within the group.
Popular opinion/vote makes for nice statistics, but often for poor decision making, especially if those forming and spreading the opinions and/or doing the voting aren't held to the high standards that are needed for good decisions to occur.
The majority of successful open source/free software projects out there are meritocracies - not wide open democracies. One need only look at the Linux kernel, all of GNU, and the various other well known projects in the OSS landscape to see that it is meritocracy that reigns supreme in the world of OSS.
If the naysayers of such meritocracies actually have things of value to add to a given OSS project, and spend their time working on such contributions instead of whining about exclusion on public forums, etc. they'd likely find themselves climbing the meritocracy food chains of said projects in short order if they truly have things of value to offer.
And each person coming to an online community will bring whatever of the above views of how a community works .. which is why a lot of people grump, flame, and disagree violently about why XYZ community initiative is not a community.
Yep, I think it is because people often want to travel straight from A to Z without having to go through B, C, D, etc. Another subset of people, "the talkers" want to dictate to the "doers" how things should be done, often without wanting to (or perhaps without having the skills to) actually do any solid contributions themselves. They can safely just be ignored. ;o)
- -- Mike A. Harris http://mharris.ca | https://twitter.com/mikeaharris