Under the thread "my test of 0.3", which had strayed into a discussion of machine guns and thermite, Michael & Brandon write:
>> Should a freenet-tangent mailing list be created :] > That is called freenet-chat. Please take discussion of thermite > to freenet-chat. Seconded. I'm an experienced software developer, who's looking for a good open-source Java program to which I could contribute. I have some ideas about making a "Chinese dissident" variant of Freenet, which would attempt to address some very(!) difficult design issues. If I make the commitment to develop such a variant, it would be all but mandatory that I read the dev list pretty much every day, for the next several years. This morning I've opened up a folder of some 150 messages, many of which are very much off-topic. The thread on killing people and blowing up things was particularly frustrating. The exchange was so completely clueless that I figured it was all just humor, but it's difficult to tell. I really don't want to spend time responding on the thread, but then I worry that if such tripe goes unchallenged, someone out there will get some disasterously stupid ideas. Even worse, while the thread was decidedly off-topic for Freenet, it was on-topic for the variant I'm interested in developing. Perhaps the developers here are so totally clueless about true real-world persecution that they'll make design decisions that will greatly complicate the implementation of a true dissident-mode variant. The needs of English-speaking western college students swapping mp3's and porn on fat-pipe Linux systems are very, very different from the needs of a dissident-mode variant. Small changes in the base code can make a big difference in how easily it can be modified for alternate environments. It's good to have some occasional off-topic banter, speculation, and humor. That's especially true on a list that is low-volume, and/or used by just a few people. This list, however, is very high-volume, is of interest to a large audience, and is pretty much mandatory reading for people who want to help with development. In that sort of situation, it makes sense to be very, very disciplined about keeping messages on-topic. Messages should even go so far as to carefully adhere to the subject line, so that others can filter without having to read the entire body of each message. Bah. If contributing to Freenet means spending half an hour per day finding a weak signal amidst this kind of noise, then forget it. It's time to find a project where I can spend my time coding instead of grepping. --Will (not speaking for my employers, though they would probably agree with me on this point) willdye at freedom.net _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
