8:20 p.m.
Hi,
Sumana Harihareswara <sh(a)changeset.nyc> skribis:
On 4/17/21 10:03 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> We could, for example, put membership requests by non-maintainers on
> hold until we’ve set this up. It would be a bummer, because we want
> equal participation of all contributors, but that’s a simple way to
> prevent the obvious infiltration scenario discussed above.
> Another way would be to require applicants to have at least (say)
> two
> years of experience contributing to GNU in a visible way.
> Lots of questions. :-)
> Ludo’.
I am a sort of marginal case as a GNU contributor, and perhaps it
might be helpful to consider my own case as a concrete example.
I have a bunch of experience contributing -- as a writer, manager,
teacher, fundraiser, tester, programmer, etc. -- to free software
projects, but very little in GNU projects. I put some months into GNU
Mailman in early 2015, and you can find my name in commit logs,
mailing list posts, and bug reports from back then. Then I worked on
GNU Autoconf last year, contributing fundraising and project
management, but did not post to Savannah or mailing lists. It's
possible to see evidence of those contributions by looking at blog
posts, news articles, and conference talks, but putting together that
portfolio would certainly take a bit more work than just running "git
log" or similar.
It’s this diversity of contributions that I had in mind. Clearly,
commits are just one kind of contribution and commit count cannot be a
useful metric.
I care about the future of software freedom, and the existence and
momentum of GNU Assembly makes me more interested in contributing more
to GNU projects in the future. It might be that I'm not well placed to
be a *member* of the Assembly -- if that's the case, I still want to
keep up with what you are doing, and I'll just keep up via the blog's
syndication feed.
We have to figure out membership but I think someone with a track record
like yours should have a say or “members” risks being a small clique.
Ludo’.