Liz, Liz wrote:
If a poster wishes to spread a message more widely to the community, they should be quite free to do so.
That's basically the same argument that we had for ages on Usenet groups where people would post offtopic messages because they wanted to reach the target audience.
The problem is: The system is there to balance your right to say something and the receiver's right to not be bothered by what you have to say.
Someone who is interested in legal topics is invited to join legal-talk. Someone who isn't should not have to deal with legal topics, no matter how important the author thought they would be.
I fully agree that this is a difficult situation *especially* with regard to the license change discussion because it has far-reaching consequences, much unlike some "can I do X under the Y license" debate. I had people complain on talk-de that they were not informed; when pointed at 2 years' worth of legal-talk discussion they said "do I look like a legal-talk subscriber?".
But at the same time, as we have seen, in an environment where everyone thinks that what he has to say is so damn important, we quickly reach the point where everyone else just goes "meh".
Maybe we could have a weekly, or bi-weekly, "legal-talk digest" posted to the talk list. Written by someone who quietly observes, and perhaps picks a few exemplary links: "This week on legal-talk: New insights on the legality of mapping military areas in Russia (link), possible modification to contributor terms of new license to enhance CC-BY compatibility (link), and heated discussion about whether Steve Coast's descendants can legally inerhit the BDFL title (link)."
I don't think that the powers-that-be would object to such a digest. It would only require someone to do it.
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
