On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 04:15:42PM +0100, Jiaxun Yang wrote:
Over recent events, I've taken a closer look at how our community's governance operates, only to find that there's remarkably little public information available about those informal groups.
There's quite a bit of information available in the Linux Kernel documentation. For example:
* https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/security-bugs.html * https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-conduct.html * https://www.kernel.org/code-of-conduct.html
Ultimately, though, governance model that we've used since the founding of the Benevolent Dictator model. For a description of this, see:
* https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Benevolent_Dictator
The reason why this model works for Open Source projects is that ultimately, the license allows the code to be forked, and someone could decide to take the Linux Kernel sources, and declare some new version, say: "Tedix". However, if I was delusional enough to do this, it's very likely no one would pay attention to me, and consider me a random madman (of which there are many on the Internet).
Ultmately, though, the reason why Linus continues to serve as the leader of the Linux is that there is a very large number of people that respect his judgement and technical acumen. And unlike in physical space where a dictator could (hypothetically) order tanks to fire on college-aged students, ultimately no one can force developers or companies to continue use or develop Linux.
Everything else follows from this. So for example, a maintainer or maintainer team can refuse to accept patches from a particular source. If someone disagrees with a decision, whether it is not accepting a patch, or request a patch that it be reverted, they can appeal to Linus. Linus ask the Maintainer for their reasons, or can decide to override the decision by accepting the patch into his tree, or reverting a patch. Ultimately, Linus can decide to relieve a maintainer of their duties by simply refusing to accept pull request from that maintainer, or by remoing the subsytem entirely from his sources.
As another example, the Code of Conduct committee has no inherent power to sanction developers, other than to make recommendations to people who actually do the work --- namely, Linus Torvalds, other maintainers, the people who run the mailing lists, etc. Like with Maintainers, their "power" comes from the respect that individuals on that body have with Linus and the other maintainers.
Yet another body which you didn't mention is the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory board. That body is elected, but the TAB has always made it clear that the primary power comes from the reputation and moral authority of the people who are elected to the TAB. Sure, The TAB chair has an at-large seat on the Linux Foundation board, but any influence that the TAB through the TAB chair might have is more because of their work and the force of their arguments.
More broadly, the model that I like to use is "servant leadership", and that's why I tell people who want to pursue taking up leadership roles in Linux. Most of the senior leadership spend a huge amount of their personal time, and have often made career choices that have prioritized working on Linux and other Open Source projects over monetary renumeration. Speaking for myself, I could have progressed farther in terms of position and salary. I made choices that traded the freedom and ability to work on Linux because that was more important to me, and there is an awful lot of what I do as a leader is to serve those people in the ext4 development community.
This is not true just in Linux; previously, I've served on the Security Area Advisory Group for the IETF, the standards body for the internet, and as working group chair for the ipsec working group when the IPSec protocols were first being standardied. Sure, I was part of the "governance" of the IETF, but one of the things you learn very quickly is that as a volunteer leader, your primary power is to stop things from happening. Hopefully, you're only stopping bad things from happening, and you can try to encourage and cajole volunteers spend time on what's necessary to make forward progress. And of course, you can spend your own personal time smoothing the way to enable the members of the community to make forward progress. And that takes us back to "servant leadership".
Cheers,
- Ted
P.S. Note that when I say "volunteer', I'm using this in a fairly broad/informal fashion. Yes, some members of the community have companies that pay our salaries to work on Linux. But as the ext4 maintainer, I don't have magement authority over the ext4 developer. I can refuse to take a patch; I can spend time creating testing infrastruture to make it easier for ext4 contributors to test their work; I can point out ways that some particular design might be good for ext4, and good for their company's business objectives, to the extent that I know their companies goals or they are willing to share those goals with me. But I can't *force* someone at SuSE or Oracle or IBM or Huawei to work on some particular ext4 feature or bug. Ultimately, either individuals (who might be hobbists) or companies, voluntarily choose to contribute to ext4, or the IPSec standard. And so that's why I call Linux and the IETF have much in common with a pure 100% volunteer organization, such as Doctors without Borders.