Re: On community influencing (was Re: [PATCH v8 2/2] rust: add dma coherent allocator abstraction.)

Ronja Meyer
2025-02-13T19:52:17Z

On 08.02.2025 21:44, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> I'll let you in a secret. The maintainers are not "all-powerfui". We
> are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code to be
> maintainable and high quality. Like most leaders of volunteer
> organization, whether it is the Internet Engineerint Task Force (the
> standards body for the Internet), we actually have very little power.
> […] structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and […] is
usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful
(whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the
structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made
are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who
know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for
initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions
that something is happening of which they are not quite aware. […]

From "The Tyranny of Structurelessness", written by Jo Freeman in 1970.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

- Ronja