You cannot establish sound governance or bylaws around particular personalities.
Where was I talking about governance? (Al's right, BTW) I was talking about my own ability to behave somewhat like a brick wall at times.
If necessary we could just pick up our community, walk away, and start over. No problem. No one can stop that.
After all, that's pretty much the story with aD. The community was neglected and to some degree disrespected (I'm talking about corporate behavior, many individual aDers were heavily supportive of the community and later our OpenACS project, and of course we have many of them in our community today). So the community got up and walked away.
Same with dotLRN users. If they don't like what the consortium does, they can walk. Governance be damned.
Credit Al with some brains. He has no reason in the world to want to trigger that sort of split.
As far as dotLRN being used regardless of what MIT does, sure it will be. Just like Linux is used on the desktop. Some of us are shooting higher, we'd like dotLRN to be prevelant like Linux in the server space.
And that takes more than just a few random public school districts adopting it, a few independent efforts to extend it, and a handful of technical people controlling its direction to achieve.
Maybe others don't care about the extent of adoption. If so, that's fine. But a governance that helps those that do shoot high isn't going to hurt those comfortable being bottom-dwellers.
