[Home]CommunityMustAgree

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For any community to adopt a behavior or rule, a significant portion of that community must have at least tacit approval to the rule.

This does not necessarily imply a majority or the total membership. But it does typically imply a majority of the influential members.

If the CommunityDoesNotAgree, then it may be impossible to enforce the new behavior.

Must the community vote, or can there be ConsensusByHabit?

Imagine taking a large mailing list (like linux-kernel) and attempting to decree "No MicroSoft email clients will be used for reading this list". There may be good reasons for this (if nobody using Outlook gets emails from the list there will be fewer virus emails sent to the list, you are less likely to have people sending email in anti-social formats like HTML or RTF, etc.) but if any significant number of people on the list disagree, it may be impossible to enforce via a CommunitySolution. On the other hand, if the community agrees, it might be possible - which happens on linux-kernel when someone reports a problem while using a binary only driver. They are told "we don't support that, take it to the vendor" (even if the problem seems to be in some unrelated part of the kernel.

--ErikDeBill


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