I think it probably is very easy to get unanimity on things like giving a grant to a Python workshop somewhere, or most other routine business of the Board. But we’re talking about a very non-routine type of business, and we have enormous amounts of evidence from other entities (for-profit, non-profit, and otherwise) that unanimity is extremely difficult to achieve with this type of business.
Becoming a PSF Fellow requires that one be well-established and respected and connected within the Python community. What are the odds that, if a Fellow were to egregiously misbehave, we’d be able to find someone who still would want to stand by them no matter what, would insist that we have to weigh the loss of their long-time contributions, would say “well they’ve always been perfectly nice and professional to me”, would say that they’ve already paid enough of a price via lesser actions being taken, “why are we ending this person’s career over this”, etc. etc.? Because in a unanimous-vote-required world, all it takes is that one person.
This is why I pointed out the incongruity with your seeming complaint about having to sit through anti-harassment training – the reason why the executives get away with it is because they have just enough supporters who will go through that litany of reasons to withhold consequences.
So let’s do the realist comparison of the two failure cases under consideration:
- Evil leadership begins purging innocent community members: no evidence presented of it happening in other projects (again, the NixOS situation was initiated by the community rising up against the leadership), and in a majority-vote-for-removal PSF bylaw world requires capturing at least 4 and likely 6-7 seats on the Board to pull off.
- Leadership unable/unwiling to impose consequences on a bad community member due to holdouts: apparently common enough that even you say you’re aware of multiple examples in business world, and in a unanimous-vote-for-removal PSF bylaw world requires capturing only one Board seat.
So to me it seems very clear that (2) is the realistic threat and the one we should spend the majority of our time threat-modeling and dealing with. Instead of which, objections to the bylaw change have been focused almost exclusively on (1). I do not think that is a logical or productive way to spend this much of our time and effort.