To avoid any doubts, the founder of this project, Paul Freeman a.k.a. Sophist is resolved that this project is and will always be a genuinely open-source project, free to copy and enhance (subject to the copyright and license conditions) free to for anyone (individual or corporation, for commercial or non-commercial uses) to run for their own benefit (but not to be run as a product or service in its own right), and free for people to enhance, and (hopefully) to contribute those enhancements back to the main project for the benefit of others.
We want this project to have longevity, both technically and as a community, and that requires governance.
Equally, once other contributors join, there needs to be an effective decision making process, particularly where consensus decisions cannot be reached, and that means governance.
The founder sees that this governance will come in three stages:
- Benevolent Dictator - essentially making most of the day-to-day decisions
- Benevolent Judge - taking a more back seat role, delegating day-to-day decisions to senior community members, stepping in and making decisions in only rare cases.
- Democratic governance - under a formal corporate structure (e.g. a foundation) or as a member of an organisation such as Software in the Public Interest (SPI).
There are various approaches taken for governance by other Open Source projects, and (in the opinion of the founder), whilst democratic governance is a goal, it can only be achieved in the largest of Open-Source project communities, and the only other successful alternative has been shown by history to be the Benevolent-Dictator governance model.
Examples of good Open Source projects which have followed the BDFL model:
- Python
- MetaBrainz
As a small, start-up. open-source project, the founder (and at the time of writing) only developer has decided that the Benevolent Dictator model is the one to be followed, not the least because the overall vision for the project is in his head.
However, it is hoped that once some critical mass of code has been reached, with some working functionality that can be shown and used, additional people will become interested in contributing, (particularly if the architecture of the solution makes such contributions easy), and at that point it is hoped that we can form a core team and distribute responsibilities.
The governance model will evolve, and this evolution will depend on the views of contributors yet to be recruited - so it is pointless to give any further details here.