Jason Self <js...@gnu.org> wrote: > My direct firsthand experience directly conflicts with what you allege to be > the case.
Nice to hear this! However, it shows how inadequate the situation is: one have to collect firsthand experience rather than read clear and concise summary on the topic, published officially. And what is published officially sometimes only makes things worse. E. g., the maintainerʼs handbook, you linked above, seems not been updated to reflect, that FSF abandoned the requirement of snail mail exchange worldwide: | Contributors residing outside the USA, Germany or India must mail the signed form to the FSF via postal mail. — https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html I also never found any official reference, that a contributor is entitled to get back from FSF an all-permissive licence on what he assigned — that radically changes the perception of the deal, but again it is backed only with anecdotal evidence. Et cetera, et cetera. Even the fact, that not every GNU package is owned by FSF, is not the common knowledge. Some argue, that GNU gained an image of unwelcoming place because of some jokes. What I observe in free and ‘open source’ software communities, though, is that GNU gained an image an unwelcoming place due to its bureaucratic practices — whether they are real or perceived. > P.S.; there's no need to address the message to me directly - I am on the > list. Excuse me, but such requests always abash me. Even if we put aside, that (a) the practice of addressing the general public while actually taking to a specific person is harmful for readability and searchability of MLs in general, and (b) itʼs vital for unreliable premoderated lists (and as a bonus, it was exactly what enabled you to reply even before my message passed the censor); what exactly are you asking me to do with that piece of information? To keep it in mind? :-\ If one has troubles in configuring his mail server / useragent and, despite all of the above, want to shift the burden of satisfying his preferences to _every_ his correspondent, there are formal ways to do that, the headers: a simple and static ‘Mail-Copies-To: never’, and no so simple ‘Mail-Followup-To’, which is no point to explain here, either his MUA supports it for the case or does not. By the way, you might notice now, that all my mail have ‘Mail-Copies-To: always’ set, which supposed to instruct MUAs _not_ to tamper with the list of recipients in the way that excludes me from it. In rarely helps, though: those, who use good MUAs, that respect it, rarely come up with an idea to drop an actual correspondent from ‘To’.
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