Remove Joel from maintainer list, move Christos to maintainer list

[athre0z]

Hi all! Today is my last working day at Elastic. I've been thinking back and forth about whether I'd like to retain the maintainer position as an external contributor in my free time, but eventually decided that I realistically won't have the time to do justice to the role. I would however like to continue contributing to the project in a less critical position.

I'm thus suggesting to simply swap roles with @christos68k, currently an approver, who is effectively taking over my position as an IC responsible for the profiling agent at Elastic.

I appear to have the GitHub permissions to add a new maintainer, as well as the permissions to remove myself. Once all of the other maintainers¹ have approved this PR, I'd be happy to apply the changes as my last action as a maintainer.

Footnotes

1. Minus Dimitry, who AFAIK is still on paternity leave ↩

[christos68k]

Thanks!

[tigrannajaryan]

This looks good to me, but I have a process comment that is also useful for the broader audience.

AFAIK, there is no such thing as substituting maintainers in Otel. An existing maintainer stepping down is a process, and a new maintainer being appointed is a separate process, that needs to follow the requirements for appointment (and does not automatically follow from a maintainer stepping down).

Keep in mind that Otel maintainership is not a chair that company owns and can pass to a different person. Otel maintainership is a personal chair, the responsibilities and privileges that come with the maintainership are the person's not their employer's. This is an important distinction. In this case @athre0z could have easily decided to stay a maintainer despite leaving an employer.

This is my reading of Otel rules, the @open-telemetry/governance-committee may want to clarify this further and correct me if my reading is incorrect.

Again, as far as I know @christos68k qualifies, so I see no problem with going ahead with the change.

[mtwo]

+1 to Tigran's comment, was about to post the same

[jpkrohling]

I agree with @tigrannajaryan: maintainership is earned by individuals, not companies.

[rockdaboot]

After reading Becoming a Maintainer, I agree with Tigran that this PR ideally should have been two PRs:

1. Joel stepping down
2. Suggesting Christos as a new maintainer

Since 1 is something that hardly can be denied, the scope here is about approving on 2, which is up to the existing maintainers and Christos himself. So from a technical perspective, we can just go on with this PR and there is no need for a PR split. Except we want to follow implicit (not explicitly written down) "formalities".

[svrnm]

@athre0z would you mind changing the PR title + the commit message for this PR to address @tigrannajaryan's comment. Something like "Remove Joel from maintainer list, move Christos to maintainer list" is probably good enough

[athre0z]

Thank you for the replies, and apologies for the confusion on the process! Since there has been unanimous agreement on accepting the suggested maintainer changes regardless, I have applied them now.

@athre0z would you mind changing the PR title + the commit message for this PR to address @tigrannajaryan's comment. Something like "Remove Joel from maintainer list, move Christos to maintainer list" is probably good enough

Sure -- done!