On 3/29/06, Chris Morgan <chmorgan@gmail.com> wrote:
How do you propose we prevent people from emailing people that post to
wine-devel? How do we choose who gets to email people directly and
who doesn't? How do we filter the contents of their email?
Segin doesn't speak for the entire community and he isn't a lead on
the project. If that were the case this would be a more serious
matter. If people quit because of him then what are we to do? Given
the lack of relationship between wine and Segin they might as well
have quit wine development because of some Nigerian money transfer
email or other spam.
My point is that the solution isn't trying to enforce censorship where
you simply cannot and where it doesn't impact the community. As long
as he doesn't abuse his list membership we have no reason to become
involved in this issue. You won't find me supporting any kind of
restrictions on what he says or which mailing lists he can belong to
at this point in time.
Chris
Ok, but here is a point for you to chew on. Say that I go on a business trip for my company, and that while on this trip, I meet with some clients, and we go out for a business dinner. A few days later, while still out of town, I run into those clients again, and we all decide to go to a billiard. While at said billiard we all start drinking. No problems there. But if I continue drinking, eventually I am going to get drunk, and need assistance getting back to my hotel room. Mind you I am on a business trip and with some clients, but I am not at a business meeting. Even though I am (at the time) not representing the company, it still looks bad for them that an employee would do that in front of the client. The same principle applies here. It looks bad on the wine project as a whole that someone who participates in the devel list would email someone (even off list) and say the things that were said. Ordinarily I am against censorship myself, but I do believe in moderation, and I believe that people should be held accountable for their actions even if they are speaking only for themself, if it makes other people or things look bad.
To answer your question, there isnt really a way, and I wasnt trying to say that we should prevent him from emailing others directly, or filtering his emails, I was saying that a lot of the things he does for the project should be restricted. AFAICT he has some high level permissions on bugzilla, and the appdb. Maybe those could (should?) be suspended temporarily, I dunno, I will leave it up to the big wigs here to decide if he should be punished in any way, and if so, what that punishment should be. As I said though, it is his opinion, and he is entitled to that opinion (at least in the US), but I think he should have kept it to himself, or at least not used such strong wording like "****ing dumb***"....