[Ethereal-users] Re: [Ethereal-dev] Major announcement

[Erwin Rol <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 15:50 +0800, Jeff Morriss wrote:
> Erwin Rol wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 17:06 -0500, Gerald Combs wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > All with all I think it is very disappointing how this was and still is
> > handled, it some how seems that core-developers distrust the other
> > developers and users. 
> 
> I have to admit I was little shocked at first, too.  But I also doubt 
> Gerald and crew have meant to offend anyone nor do they distrust the 
> other developers and users.  

I doubt that too, but sometimes certain actions are hard to explain
without the right information.

> One problem that sometimes arises, I think, 
> is that if the leader of an open project such as this one starts a 
> discussion in a public forum about a name change or fork or whatever a 
> massive discussion ensues with everyone and their brother offering an 
> opinion.  

And that is a bad thing ? I think that's a vital part of a FOSS project.
The leaders also don't reject the help of those people. At least
informing the people would have giving them a choice to build an opinion
on the topic.

> That's all fine and good but if the leader has already made up 
> his or her mind about it then everyone has just wasted their breath 
> and/or gets even more upset when the leader makes the change because 
> they think the leader has ignored their opinion.

Well the leader _did_ ignore all opinions, actually he ignored them so
bad that he didn't even bother ask for opinions.

>   In the end, the 
> project isn't a democracy.  People can discuss it before the change (if 
> it's announced beforehand) or after the change (as we are now), but how 
> much does it really matter which case is taken?

so we should only "pay our tax" and shut up ? This is a great way to
cause a fork of a project. 

So maybe instead of discussing a decision that is force onto us, we
maybe should now discusses on how we can prevent that the project
changes its name every time Gerald gets a new job, or otherwise has a
bad day. 

- Erwin