The Problem Of Governance (or lack thereof)

[George Mitchell]

I am starting a new thread because "The Case for Rust" is already too
big, and the questions I am about to ask here are not about Rust. This
is going to be a bit philosophical and I think more important than any
concrete
I have *intentionally* added CORE team to the address list.
Our official website says

Core Team constitutes the project’s "Board of Directors", responsible

for deciding the project’s overall goals and direction as well as
managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape. [1]
or here [2]

The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.

The "Case for Rust" ml thread has re-surfaced a lot of *very important*
questions that do require a governing body to actually do its work - to
govern, to produce decisions. This is hard and someone has to take the
responsibility.
- Why Rust?
- Why now?
- Do we even need more languages in base?

My vote here would be no.

- What is wrong with current languages available?
- Does it mean we are going add the next hype tech to the base too?

I strongly hope not!

[... much good material on the above issues ...]
- Who are we?
- What do we do?
- Why we do it?
- How we do it?
[...]
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-core
[2] https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2023-01-2023-03/core/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

Good luck with your poll. I willingly substitute the Core Team as my
proxy to answer your questions, because I believe their relative
invisibility is the strongest marker of their success. Core Team, you
are doing a good job, at least in my humble opinion! -- George

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

I am a full-time FreeBSD user (both desktop and servers) since 2017. To
me, and to many other community members as I am sure Core does not
really exist.

Core is not the "Board of Directors", who makes all the hard
decisions, and everybody else shuts up and codes in the direction
they are told to.

Core is more of a "General Secretary" function, who's job it is to
keep the meeting in order, provide paper, pencils and refreshments,
and diplomatically try to facilitate the delegates reaching some kind
of consensus, or if they cannot, to credibly count the votes.

As to Rust in src, the meeting is still ongoing, intelligent and
informed opinions and arguments are being exchanged, so core@ is
probably leaning back, enjoying the sound of a project humming
along just the way core@ likes it to...

Poul-Henning
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
***@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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[Rob Wing]

I find it very confusing. A former core team member and a prominent
member of the community openly denies the
documented purpose of the elected team. The core itself remains silent.
Who to believe?

sounds like the website could be updated to reflect phk's description.

any other confusions?

[Joe Schaefer]

Does anyone know what happened to Gmail’s thread mute functionality?

Post by Rob Wing

I find it very confusing. A former core team member and a prominent
member of the community openly denies the
documented purpose of the elected team. The core itself remains silent.
Who to believe?

sounds like the website could be updated to reflect phk's description.
any other confusions?