The authority of Jonathan (Was: Re: [vorbis] Re: PROPOSAL: Sub-Tagging)

[Jonathan Walther]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 08:02:30PM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
>A vote of who? I admit to not having read up all about the Xiph
>organization and how it makes decisions; I've always assumed that
>anything anyone wanted to say was no more than advisory, and that final
>decisions would be made by Jack and Monty as they saw fit, regardless of
>votes or anything else. Is there a Constitution somewhere that says that
>votes taken on the mailing list are binding on the development team? I
>would be rather surprised if that were so.
>
>What really rubs me the wrong way about you is the immense
>self-importance that seems to infect most of your messages. You seem to
>think that you have the authority to dictate standards to the people who
>have done all the real work (and, to be clear, I'm not including myself
>in that group -- my interest in Vorbis is purely as an end-user), and
>that you are authorized to represent the entire class of classical music
>listeners who might use Vorbis someday. It's all a load of crap, as far
>as I'm concerned. I have no respect for it and I'm not afraid to let
>that show.

You have a wrong impression.  I'll try to correct it.

Monty has final say.  Theres never been any question about that.

When I have rejected peoples suggestions flat out, its not because I am
saying it, it is generally because Monty has already said, in email or
on IRC, "no way!".  I have been working within the constraints of what
Monty has already said he would accept.  All proposals for keeping the
ARTIST tag have violated his dictum about subtagging and imposing
structure on the tag data.

Now, Monty and Jack are very busy coding.  They don't have time and
energy for the kind of flamefest they feared discussion over a proposed
tagging standard like this would become.  A tagging standard is not
central to the code.  It is an issue that many users find important, but
its not a code issue, nor is it something the Vorbis developers should
have to spend a lot of time worrying about before the release of 1.0.

When there is a sensible proposal, and a sizeable number of people have
sniffed it over and said "this is good", its likely Monty or Jack will
quietly stick it up on the website and say "this is a standard we
approve of".

As long as people like you who want XML metadata galore are trashing any
proposed tagging specification because you don't have your own metadata
standardization sandbox to play in, there will be no tagging standard,
and Ogg the phenomenon will be the poorer for it.

I'm the one that originated this proposal. I'm trying to make it useful
to enough people that enough people will tell Monty "hey, I think we
should make this our standard."  Thats what this whole consensus gathering
exercise has been about.  Open Source is about scratching your itch.
I need this standard, other people need this standard, and we've been
doing what we can to move it forward.  If that is "self important", please
shoot me now.

Jonathan

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