Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Certainly. Closing lists won't stop the private abuse, nor is it intended to. > > What it would stop is this particular thread talking endlessly about it. > >> Closing a mailing list >> will not close such a debate; it will then just happen elsewhere. > > And that is the goal.
So now we finally get to the point: The whole story has actually *nothing* to with Fred. It is about what I said in the very first posting: It is an attempt to suppress opinions, by taking away people an important channel to raise their voice. The whole Fred example was only a rhetorical trick: An attempt to find at least *one* example where you believe that the developers' opinion is undoubtfully the right one, an attempt to justify the ivory tower. This one example - it plays no role whether it is justified or whether there is another one - is completely suppressing the fact that in almost all cases on dev-ml (trivial "ACK" things aside) *are* clearly discussable (concerning technical topics) and *should* be discussed. In fact, all these *other* discussions are the actual purpose of dev-ml. Closing the channel simply excludes non-developers from these discussions dev-ml is made for. Concering Gentoo's reputation, you can be sure that this step will be only contraproductive: - In Fred's case anyway, because people with the opinion that something strange is going on with this case will see their opinion just confirmed; outsiders anyway. - For people not involved or not interested in Fred's case it is clearly even worse. From the outsider viewpoint as well. This closing harms Gentoo a lot: I am driven away from Gentoo by such an undemocratic step. Certainly I am not the only one: Others also already formulated similar opinions on this and the project mailing list, at least if you are able to read between the lines. > Could you take this debate to the appropriate place then? Do not worry, this is presumably my last post on the topic (soon I would not be able to post, anyway). I am aware that the undemocratic decision has already been made (BTW unsurprisingly in a not very democratic way), so it makes no sense to discuss about it further. My post was just a final attempt at least to mitigate the damage done by this decision by speaking for the only thing which can still be done purely technically: Blacklisting instead of whitelisting. With whitelisting you will only attract that type of non-developers who are willing to beg a gang to be a member of them. Of course, if a secondary aim should be to get only uncritical followers (or pretenders) and to drive away everybody else, whitelisting is the correct choice.
