Mark Sapiro writes:
Scot Hacker wrote:
Long story short, if I were to submit a patch, would it likely be accepted? Or is there a good reason why it's not included?
Probably yes. The reason it was never include upstream is that Apple has *never* shared any of its Mailman changes with the upstream GNU-Mailman project.
Of course it has shared the changes.
What it never done is to provide free labor to liaison with Mailman and integrate its changes into Mailman. Personally, I can't blame them. Even in projects where I'm a core contributor it's often difficult to get my changes in in the form that I think is best, and my experience with contributing to projects I'm not a core member of have been downright miserable. "In-spected, ne-glected, re-jected, and de-jected"[1] being a common outcome.
If an assignment is the problem, that's still not a "failure to share" as defined in the open source community IMO. That's *our* failure to accept the sharing on terms that are accepted by every definition of "free software".
The Mailman team has every right to choose which which changes it will devote its labor to. But the changes *are* shared -- they're available both physically and legally. It's our choice not to provide labor, or not to accept universally acceptable terms. Please let's use more accurate rhetoric, and not cut off our nose to spite our face.
Footnotes: [1] With apologies to Alice and the Restaurant.