Re: Open Source

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> writes:

    Simon> On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 08:37:21PM +0900, Stephen
    Simon> J. Turnbull wrote:
    >> Bzzt.  Cast of thousands.  Well, about two dozen, anyway.
    >> Archdaemons:

    Simon> True, but there's still a defined maintainer.

No, there isn't.  Steve Baur was the last "Mr. XEmacs"-style
maintainer, and it was one of his achievements as maintainer to get
rid of the need for that job.

Now, different people have primary authority over different parts of
the repository.  We have currently three job titles containing the
word "maintainer", and none of them cover the packages, arguably the
most user-visible portion of the application (most modes are defined
in packages).

See http://www.xemacs.html/Develop/jobs.html.

This is somewhat out of date as to exact personnel; at least one
Review member has resigned, and two have been added with two or three
more current candidates.  But it gives you an idea.

C'mon, Simon, the rest of your examples should be sufficient to make
your point.  It just isn't true for XEmacs, though.  I don't think
it's true for Apache, either.  And then there's the HURD, where last I
checked the maintainership was the NULL set.  ;-) How about Mozilla,
GTK, GNOME, ...?

Oh, and by the way, the development branch (important because that's
where the management issues arise---unlike the stable XEmacs, which is
actively maintained, GNU Ghostscript is simply an obsolete stable
Aladdin Ghostscript) of Ghostscript is not open source; AFPL doesn't
qualify.[1]  It's sort of like the relationship between Netscape and
Mozilla, although of course Aladdin Ghostscript is effectively open
source for the purposes of most Linux users.



Footnotes: 
[1]  I do wonder how Peter snuck onto SourceForge.

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