Hello, A long response to Anthoni Shogun's query about why we don't just ignore bad postings in this list.
FOSS is largely a _community_ activity. If people behave badly with the community then even great ideas, coding or philosophy cannot excuse them. If you don't believe me then see the criticism of people like Stallman, Schilling and Shuttleworth over the last few years. According to me, the "freedom" in FOSS is more in the sense of the fundamental rights granted by the constitution --- these come along with some fundamental duties. In summary, if you will not work with the community then the community will not work for you. Thus, a big part of working with FOSS is learning to use your ego to drive you to be more creative rather than use it to fight other creators. This involves learning to use mail, irc, comments, commit messages and the like to _communicate_ on those things which other people want to hear _in context_. A long comparision on the BSD licence vs. GPL license will not be welcome within a comment section of a source file even though it may be completely relevant in an online forum. There are two ways in which most community members react to stuff that violates community guidelines. One is to ignore the poster. This is the method used on high-volume lists. Some other lists like ILUG-C have many more newcomers and are low-volume enough that attempting-to-educate is a legitimate alternative. The latter may sound like "noise" to those used to the former kind of list. However, note that elimination of such noise from one's mail reader is just a matter of learning to "kill-thread" in incoming mailing list mail. Regards, Kapil. -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
