[FFmpeg-devel] Is the GA democratic ?

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Tue, Jan 21, 2025 at 02:53:36PM -0300, James Almer wrote:
> On 1/21/2025 2:41 PM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > Hi
> > 
> > As people likely know i belive it is not but i got a 2nd opinion:
> > 
> > 
> > I asked chat gpt this:
> 
> You can't possibly be serious.
> 
> > Is it a democracy, if only people can vote who have performed a specific action at least 20 times in the last 3 years? This way 49 of over 2000 people can only vote
> 
> Michael, please, stop trying to push that number. There are not 2000 active
> contributors. There's 2000 people currently subscribed to the mailing list
> for whatever reason, be it sending patches, reviewing patches, because
> mailman/pipermail has no RSS, or just to watch the drama.

There where 1892 subscribers in 2011, thats 14 years ago

also you sound like an aristrocrat looking out of the window and saying
there cant possibly be that many common people, I have never seen them
in the palace.


> Every other day i get an automated email from mailman telling me about two
> or three removed subscriptions because of excessive bounces or similar, and
> almost always from unusual domains.

> I or anyone else could, right now, go and create a hundred disposable email
> addresses, and subscribe all of them. Do you want them to be able to cast a
> vote?

Can you also create them with email addresses one can find with google
which have lifes behind them, are active elsewhere and so on ?


> 
> You can, and i encourage you, to suggest to change the requirements to
> access the GA. It can be to make the deadline further into the past, less
> upstreamed patches, anything.

Being a "member of the commuity" should give them a vote if you want to
call it a democracy in relation to the FFmpeg community


> You can also, i should remind you, propose people to be part of the GA that
> don't currently fulfill the requirements.

Do you not see the problem here ?
Lets just imagine this would be how the US electorate worked
Republicans have a majority, they vote in every Republican
Democrats have a majority, they vote in every Democrat
Whoever is first can end the democracy

If you want a democracy, you need fair rules, rules before everyone is equal
if you want to give everyone who fixed a bug a vote right, do that dont vote
on people


thx

[...]

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

If a bugfix only changes things apparently unrelated to the bug with no
further explanation, that is a good sign that the bugfix is wrong.
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