Talli makes a good point that the philosophy of each proposal may not be
clear. I'll try to help on the philosophy of the OF proposal:
An open-source project is generally successful because it has strong
technical leadership and a modular design to allow for distributed innovation.
The OF proposal seeks to provide direction with an empowered,
technically-oriented gatekeeper (whose term should be limited in time to
prevent abuse of power) and to allow innovation by minimizing the
extent of control.
At the end of the day, innovation and greatness don't come from committees
(ever seen a statue built to honor a committee?). Think of OpenACS: although
there is a committee of gatekeepers, there is a single de-facto leader. At times
I played that role, but these past few months it's most certainly been Don. In
fact, the other gatekeepers (including myself) have effectively served as a
Technical Advisory Board to Don. And although the needs and funds of users
(GreenPeace, Sloan, Berklee) have certainly driven development of new
functionality - without the intervention of any committee, by the way-, technical
decisions and progress on OpenACS core have always been led by
experienced technologists. User features are driven through needs/funds;
technical architecture is driven through meritocracy and technical
qualifications. Given that we're discussing a product (dotLRN) that has come
out of this very OpenACS process and is considered, to date, fairly promising,
it makes sense to set up a minimalist governing body to mimic this initial
success. It also makes sense to build in a process for change in governance
over time to enable evolution of these processes.
