> > Once more, the rules make a point to enforce politeness but they seem > to avoid things like having the respect to answer a honest question. > > Collated for ease of reply, though there were also implicit questions and examples of what was meant in the email.
- what is our commitment to free software ? - should we collaborate (fund, advertise,...) with closed proprietary software ? - how do we take decisions (equality, transparency, collaboration, taking care of minorities,...) ? - are there some reserved territories within the source code ? - is the acceptation of google terms of service a necessary condition for a person to be allowed to take part to the decisions ? - who is on the short list ? - with which motivation ? - which concrete examples in mind ? - Should google's rules rule our policy ? Could we thus have an answer to the ones aked by Therry ? Not ignoring > anybody is also part of elementary "friendliness". > > Though to be fair, the right not to answer is probably also a right. I'll comment briefly on a couple of these, with no claims to accuracy, just my impressions. I do think it's fair for people to respond, though I also think a lot of this is pretty far from the code of conduct discussion. * re: Google - I believe that on various occasions William has invited personal emails when it was appropriate to keep things off the record, and I am sure that if anyone asked, a proxy vote by such means would be accepted, though it would probably have to be from someone who didn't just say "Yeah, sure, I read sage-devel all the time without subscribing ... yeah, sure." * re: free vs. proprietary - there is a VERY wide range of opinion on the appropriateness here, and healthy discussion of it. It seems that Sage as an entity (insofar as such a thing exists) has the in practice position (not that any one actual human holds this position!) that a strong free license like GPL is necessary for mathematical reasons, but that depending on the situation it will remain agnostic as to collaboration with other software. However, I don't think the current discussion impacts this either way - and in any case it would be in practice impossible to change the license, as William pointed out sometime earlier. So in some ways Sage is "living the tension" of the open source community. That isn't going to go away; there will never be a unified position on these points among Sage developers. * re: reserved territory - I don't agree with Raymond on everything, but his point in "Homesteading the Noosphere" is still true that in projects like ours "authority follow[s] responsibility". So there are people who have poured a lot of time into certain areas and really *understand* them, and so do have some de facto claim on what happens. But this is not measurable in lines of code or commits or Trac edits or anything like that, and becomes fluid. No one is incapable of being overruled on Trac, though typically practice has been that if something comes to sage-devel and then no one really responds, the conflicting parties need to work it out on their own - usually in such cases a ticket simply is abandoned, as a release manager would be pretty reluctant to intervene except in the case of a serious bug. (For an example not related to most of the parties most aggrieved by this discussion, for a long time Burcin was "the" symbolics guy for this reason; yet even as he has moved to other responsibilities, newer folks like mjo and rws have been helping and gaining that authority. It is totally organic, yet when Burcin makes a comment on this code now, naturally it's taken very seriously - and gratefully.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
