It's a bureaucracy, but necessarily so [LWN.net]

It's a bureaucracy, but necessarily so

Posted Mar 1, 2007 17:49 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
Parent article: Codifying the meritocracy

This whole system may seem rather bureaucratic, and perhaps it is.

In my opinion, this bureaucracy is necessary for the following reasons:

The project community only has developers who have demonstrated their desire and intent to participate in the project (by satisfying all the requirements of the join process).
Often the membership process entails gaining an understanding of the project's goals, mission, and vision (I haven't read the specific process for Debian or Fedora). The side effect of this is that those developers who finish the join process are usually aligned in their thought processes and actions toward realizing the project's vision.
A formal, codified procedure for membership, production of deliverables (code, documentation, etc.), and quality review all work towards maintaining high standards of quality for the project's products.

Now that I think about it, this isn't that much different than private companies with employees who receive compensation (I'm thinking of proprietary software firms as an example), but the fundamental difference here is that the project's philosophies aren't totally distorted by motivations of monetary profit or time constraints. Instead, creative thought and ingenuity prevail. Gee, I'm loving FLOSS more and more every day!

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