On Tuesday, October 10, 2000 10:31 AM, John Barnette
[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> D'you think it's a possibility to provide read-only access to the lists
> for interested parties?
Read-only and carefully censored lists are irrelevant to the goals of Perl 6's
giving voice to the perl community. They lead us right back where we were
before, with a core group free to sit back unchallenged on their complacency
and let Perl go to rot. To accomplish a "community contributed" Perl, this way
of thinking, the elitism, the os-centrism, the corporate control, must have
checks and balances of some type.
I don't disagree that the developers should have closed off lists. However, I
don't agree that the developers should be able to ignore the community within a
closed-off little clique.. If they can, then a "community contributed" and
community based Perl is a farce, and cannot be otherwise.
How do we allow the core developers some peace, while giving the community FREE
voice? Free being, if it's perl related, it's valid. Free by any other
definition is also a farce.
Again, I absolutely insist what I've said elsewhere before, that programming
the perl core on Tom's specific architecture, or someones specific OS, is not a
proper qualification for "contributing" to the perl community. Many, many
contributions would thereby be worthless and of no use to anyone. Many tens of
thousands of man-hours would be irrelevant to this elitist mentality. There's
more to Perl than perl.
We need to keep Perl moving forward, not just perl.
If the elitist mentality returns, we're no better off in Perl 6 than we were
from 5.003 to 5.006, with the culmination of all bads being in 5.6. If the
community is to have a voice, that voice cannot be silenced at the whim of "the
powers that be". It is my understanding of Larry's wishes for Perl 6 that we
move from completely oligarchical society to a completely (or at least
generally) democratic one.