There seems to be some serious anger in some of the posts here. Why does this proposal upset some folks so much? Or, to put it differently, if Al's proposal is put into place, what do you think is going to happen? What terrible, nefarious plans could he have up his sleeve? It is not in MIT's best interests to piss off the OpenACS community when their package depends on it. If they wanted to do something for personal gain, MIT could take the package and sell it, which would be far more profitable than going through all this show of building a community. I just can't see what all the fuss is about... it's clear that some folks don't trust MIT, but even looking at it from that perspective I don't see what harm they can really do with all this.
If nothing else, Al has shown that he wants to be sensitive to the needs of the community, just by virtue of having this public debate. If his governance structure turns out not to work as well as intended, I have no doubt that he will modify it accordingly. That is probably part of the reason for MIT's controlling of the process initially - so they can make sure a working process is in place before the committees are left to run themselves.
