Neophytus, for example, might decides dotLRN doesn't interest me. He might think, for example: "I don't give a shit about dotLRN and would rather be a pure hacker." Or he might find the governance mechanism too constraining and oppressive. Fine. The world needs people like Neophytus. But the world also needs dotLRN or something like it based on opensource.
Isn't this contrary to the "opensource" way? There is no single way that opensource communities work. Perhaps this doesn't have a precedent. But dotLRN is also unprecedented. We want this to be the killer app in the eLearning space: a vertical application that will be used by universities, schools, non-profits, *and* corporations. I am convinced that dotLRN will not succeed unless we accept as a first principle that Users Rule.
Al, thank you very much for your response. First of all, it's Neophyt*o*s but don't worry about it -- Roberto did the same mistake in a private email last night.
The main issue I suppose is, that Neophytos or someone else might think "I don't like the way dotLRN mechanisms work and I'm gonna start .MINE." How would the OpenACS project view .LRN and .MINE, then? Would .LRN and .MINE be just two competing projects that are based on OpenACS? What would happen if the two projects required different changes on the OpenACS core? For the sake of this discussion you can assume that .MINE empowers the developers to control the direction of the project. Provided that I'm a non-native English speaker, I would gladly rephrase if something is not clear in my post.