Due to the haphazard and generally lacklustre attitude that has been provided by the BPI team when considering the open source elements surrounding their projects, I thought that I would post a link to a interesting talk that discussed the issues surrounding open source project governance.
I think that the article and corresponding video would be of interest to both @sinovoip, @frank-w and @garywang.
Also, I apologies for posting this comment to the news category but considering that there is a lack of a general or chat category, I could not find any other categories that would be more suitable for this topic.
Don’t people have the ability to Fork a distribution and do whatever they want with it? Isn’t that in a way even more flexible than a democratic process? Meaning you don’t even have to get a popular vote to do whatever you want, because you could just Fork the distribution, or choose any distribution you’d like within reason, as long as you are okay with its license, and turn that distribution into anything you’d like to see.
@etyrnal,
It is true that anybody can modify and redistribute their own versions of open source software, I have actually published an article about this subject (URL provided below).
However, considering that BPI does state that it provide open source products and then fails to provide reasonable extra support for these products (it seems that volunteers including @frank-w provide the majority of support for BPI products) whilst, at the the same time, BPI does not seemly provide sufficient help and support to their contributors.
@etyrnal,
More importantly, if a (private sector) supplier does provide distributions and provide support infrastructure (such as this forum) to help their users, it should not be incumbent on volunteers to provide the majority of the support for the original distributors products.
Therefore, providing some form of governance framework could be useful not only for the distributor but also for their contributors and end users.