Jaromil, et. al.,

Jaromil wrote:
> dear Miles and other readers of this uncomfortable thread,
>
> On Mon, 01 Dec 2014, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
>> Personally, I'm waiting and seeing. Certainly not giving any money,
>> and not contributing any resources (though I have contributed "design
>> goals" and "design review" of a sort). So far, I'll give these folks
>> the benefit of the doubt and see if any of the promised early code and
>> infrastructure materializes. Then I'll worry about names, detailed
>> c.v.s, and organizing documents.
> thanks for your attitude. this sort of criticism is welcome.
>
> as for identifying myself now, at least as responsible for the financial
> operation: I don't really believe much in national IDs being a proof,
> rather than peer network trust. For that, Debian uses PGP signatures.

Well... in truth, there is a point to be made when formalizing a
project. (And I speak as one who's started and ran a rather successful
non-profit for a dozen years - look at my c.v. on LinkedIn, or Google
"The Center for Civic Networking")

When Stallman started hacking (TECO, emacs, Lisp Machine), as an MIT
student - he spent years sleeping in the AI lab (I was there at the
time). But the Lisp Machine code ultimately went into a formal,
commercial product (LMI), and his GNU efforts ultimately are part of a
formal non-profit entity (FSF) - with a board of directors, bylaws,
copyrights (copylefts), and the whole nine yards of formal governance
and accountability.

Likewise, Linus started Linux as a student project - but it's morphed
into a much more formal operation (granted, with Linus as benevolent
dictator - but with mechanisms in place for long-term, post-Linus
continuity).

If Devuan is going to be a serious distro, at some point, a level of
formal organization structure and accountability is going to be
necessary. Debian has carried it a bit too far, perhaps, but still...
necessary.

So.. in the short term, partial anonymity is ok -- your results will
speak for themselves. Either a distro will start showing up on a
repository, and work as advertised, or it won't.

But... once the initial release is available, visibility,
accountability, governance, and such will really be necessary in order for:
- people to actually start using Devuan (who's going to waste time on
something unless it looks like it will be maintained)
- people to contribute their own time, effort, machine cycles, money -
that's the point at which one seriously starts caring about who the
folks are, and how they operate (just ask yourself - would you get
involved in a project with Lennart Poettering at its helm, or some of
the folks currently on the Debian Technical Committee?)

So... I get that some are reluctant to be visible in public, and in some
sense, there's really no need to - until you've actually published some
Devuan code. But... at some point, people won't take you, or the
effort, seriously, if you don't start paying attention to project
management and governance issues. IMHO, that's kind a critical
distinction between hacking, and a professional effort. At some point,
people will start evaluating things other than the code.

Again, just one man's opinion.

Miles Fidelman



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra