[gentoo-dev] Re: Mailing list moderation and community openness

[Martin Vaeth]

Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> 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.