>so much as send me a patch. How rude can you get?
I _hope_ to be still allowed to choose what to do in my spare time.
Andrea,
You certainly have the right to do so. However, not dropping
Michael a note when his name was clearly listed in the sources was
indeed very rude. Your further claims about how you can't be expected
to search the entire web looking for the maintainer, and ignoring the
fact that his name and copyright were on the sources --- and that maybe,
JUST MAYBE, he was the maintainer --- wasn't rude per se, but it was
lame.
No one is claiming that what you did was somehow illegal;
however, what you did did contradict the general customs of our
electronic society. You can choose to be antisocial if you wish, but
then you have no right to complain when people choose to call you
antisocial.
That being said, it sounds like you might have a legitimate beef
if you think that Michael hasn't been a responsive maintainer. If that
were the case, the right thing to have done was to send a private note
to him asking what the status was. If you had done that, he might very
well have given the maintainership over to you, and that would have been
that. If you then don't get a response from the maintainer, it would
have been appropriate to send an e-mail message to the list asking about
who the maintainer was, and so on. But there are a set of customs that
you have to follow if you don't want people to think you are a loser.
These customs have been informally codified and people have
lived by them for a very long time. More recently, Eric Raymond has
done a fairly good job of formally describing them, if you're not
already familiar with them; please read Homesteading the Noosphere if
you want to see a treatment of these customs from the point of view of a
net.anthropologist.
The main thing, though, is that courtesy is really good thing
for everyone. So may I suggest that we just drop this. Let's assume
that Andrea simply didn't understand the rules and accidentally
transgressed them without meaning to hurt anyone, and let's move on.
We're all trying to work together, remember? Let's remember who the
real enemy is; this in-fighting serves no purpose.
- Ted
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