Rick Langschultz wrote:
Creating a private mailing list not available to the community restricts information from getting to developers that want to continue to develop reactos, whether they commit or not.
The private mailing list has nothing to do with development and certainly contains no information that could be deemed useful towards the development of ROS. It's just somewhere developers can discuss sensitive issues without worrying about setting a an exponential bomb off.
All projects have their problems. It's much better for both the project and community as a whole if these problems aren't broadcast worldwide. We used to use personal emails or MSN, this just takes over that role making it easier and quicker.
I'll give you an example, take the recent allegations of leaked MS source code in the ReactOS repository. These allegations completely were untrue, however as soon as this found it's way onto the public mailing list, drastic and maybe over reactive actions were taken. This email has single handidly stopped all development of ReactOS for the past 2 weeks and has the potential of holding the project up for a year or two. It's safe to say the project has been in trouble of dying off completely.
Now, if this mail was received privately, we could have dealt with the issue internally and avoided all this mess. Development would have continued whilst we resolved any potential issues. For the community and the project as a whole, which would you consider to be the better option?
All projects have their problems, you just never hear about them because they aren't made public. There is nothing to be gained by hanging out your dirty linen in public.
Ged.
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