Talk:OpenSource-Dev

Mailing list etiquette?

As of this moment, there are 387 subscribers to the sldev mailing list. As you would expect with a big public mailing list, most of those people don't post to the list. Of course, a handful of people post a lot. That's ok; if you have something to say, you should say it. However, I also want to make sure that if someone has something to say that everyone needs to read, that it gets read. If there's too much to sort through, that might not happen.

We've discussed the idea that we should split off separate mailing lists. In particular, there are two different proposals:

• sldev-contributors - for those that have signed contribution agreements (MISC-30)
• sldev-policy - for legal and policy issues (MISC-44)

I've resisted going down that path, because I think that the groupings we want are going to be more fluid than is practical to keep up with (one day we'll want to split off policy, the next day we'll want to split off caching discussions, etc).

I'd like to keep things almost the way that they are, but introduce new guidelines:

• If a topic generates more than five replies in less than 24 hours, it's time to redirect that conversation to one of our other tools, either the wiki or the bug tracker.
• If the topic is not specifically a Second Life development-related topic (e.g. this email, or a licensing discussion), it should be redirected to the wiki or the bug tracker immediately. One post per 48 hours should be sufficient to bring it to everyone's attention.
• If after 48 hours, the topic seems to have died out on the alternate forum, it's ok to reraise the issue on this mailing list, summarizing the offlist conversation thusfar, and calling for further comment in the alternate forum.

I think this policy strikes a good balance between making sure that people have a large forum to raise and discuss a broad spectrum of issues, while at the same time ensuring that the list doesn't become overwhelmed with discussion on a single topic that may not be of interest to everyone on the list.

Thoughts? -- Rob Linden 10:26, 23 March 2007 (PDT)

As for the the topics that have done this (moved to the wiki or jira), they have been very successful. I second.

Email is obviously a bad idea, but jira/wiki is worse. Forums are the obvious answer to anyone - unless your goal is to put road blocks up before discussion (which certainly makes sense when you want to keep the community from organizing), in which case I suppose this all make sense.

Jira is for bug reports. Wiki pages are great for documents detailing focused ideas, such as wikipedia entries. But having a dialogue between participants is not what they are meant for. There are no threads, no way to filter, rate participants and find new discussion. The only goal seems to be, as I said above, to keep the community from discussing coherently among themselves.

What LL is looking for here, let's face it, are people to contribute to their open source project without giving up some kind of control to the community. I'm sure that makes sense to some people around here, but it makes zero sense to me.

I (and I am sure many others) have avoided contributing to opensim simply because we've been waiting for LL to come around and realise that they need to work with us as a community and not as people to do their singular bidding. In some ways, opensl is becoming a threat to us all, not the opportunity LL wants to make it out to be. The only way to deal with that threat seems to be to work with the opensim crowd and wrench control away rather than work with Linden Lab.

Is this really what you guys wanted? It certainly isn't what I want. It puts at risk everything I (and everyone else) have tried to build (and we've built a lot for SL. Far more than 95% of your so called open source developers) in secondlife.. but so is the whole direction you're going with OpenSL.

It's a question of picking our masters - the freedom BSD folks or the "you must GPL everything and you can only talk in jira or wiki folks."

Pick your poison, I guess.