Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 9 May 1999 19:49:46 -0400 (EDT) | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: Maintainers |
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Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 00:04:04 +0200 (CEST) From: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@e-mind.com>
>so much as send me a patch. How rude can you get?
I _hope_ to be still allowed to choose what to do in my spare time.
Andrea,
You certainly have the right to do so. However, not dropping Michael a note when his name was clearly listed in the sources was indeed very rude. Your further claims about how you can't be expected to search the entire web looking for the maintainer, and ignoring the fact that his name and copyright were on the sources --- and that maybe, JUST MAYBE, he was the maintainer --- wasn't rude per se, but it was lame.
No one is claiming that what you did was somehow illegal; however, what you did did contradict the general customs of our electronic society. You can choose to be antisocial if you wish, but then you have no right to complain when people choose to call you antisocial.
That being said, it sounds like you might have a legitimate beef if you think that Michael hasn't been a responsive maintainer. If that were the case, the right thing to have done was to send a private note to him asking what the status was. If you had done that, he might very well have given the maintainership over to you, and that would have been that. If you then don't get a response from the maintainer, it would have been appropriate to send an e-mail message to the list asking about who the maintainer was, and so on. But there are a set of customs that you have to follow if you don't want people to think you are a loser.
These customs have been informally codified and people have lived by them for a very long time. More recently, Eric Raymond has done a fairly good job of formally describing them, if you're not already familiar with them; please read Homesteading the Noosphere if you want to see a treatment of these customs from the point of view of a net.anthropologist.
The main thing, though, is that courtesy is really good thing for everyone. So may I suggest that we just drop this. Let's assume that Andrea simply didn't understand the rules and accidentally transgressed them without meaning to hurt anyone, and let's move on. We're all trying to work together, remember? Let's remember who the real enemy is; this in-fighting serves no purpose.
- Ted
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