[Mailman-Users] GMane?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:

    Brad> Clearly, there is a benefit here to the Gmane users,
    Brad> potentially even a commercial benefit.  But what do they
    Brad> contribute back to the larger Mailman community?

I don't think that's a useful question to ask.  Open source is not
about paybacks.  (Although copyleft clearly is, to many people.)  Open
source is about payforwards.  I do something for you, and you do
something for somebody else.  What goes around, comes around,
eventually.  I think Gmane qualifies on that score: I know a lot of
contributors to open source projects who think Gmane makes their work
more effective.

In the case of Gmane, I know the jam at jamux address; I can't think of
any code contributions off the top of my head, but John has impressed
me as someone who makes good contributions to discussion on several
lists.  I'd be sorry to lose his contributions, even though I'm not
willing to follow his lead in this case.  Isn't his support (along
with others like him) enough to qualify Gmane as a "contributor"?
IMHO, it should be.

    Brad> 	If they were to actually operate by the rules they
    Brad> espouse, [...].  But we know they're not operating by those
    Brad> rules.

Aye, there's the rub.  I don't much like the rules that they actually
play by.  The procedures are biased toward producing mistakes of this
kind.  And by the nature of their service they tend to impose their
standards for privacy protection etc on the lists that they gateway.
The combination is not appealing for Mailman, I'm afraid.


-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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              ask what your business can "do for" free software.