[Mailman-Developers] add_members and nomail

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Sapiro writes:
 > Scot Hacker wrote:
 > >
 > >Long story short, if I were to submit a patch, would it likely be
 > >accepted? Or is there a good reason why it's not included?
 > 
 > Probably yes. The reason it was never include upstream is that Apple
 > has *never* shared any of its Mailman changes with the upstream
 > GNU-Mailman project.

Of course it has shared the changes.

What it never done is to provide free labor to liaison with Mailman
and integrate its changes into Mailman.  Personally, I can't blame
them.  Even in projects where I'm a core contributor it's often
difficult to get my changes in in the form that I think is best, and
my experience with contributing to projects I'm not a core member of
have been downright miserable.  "In-spected, ne-glected, re-jected,
and de-jected"[1] being a common outcome.

If an assignment is the problem, that's still not a "failure to share"
as defined in the open source community IMO.  That's *our* failure to
accept the sharing on terms that are accepted by every definition of
"free software".

The Mailman team has every right to choose which which changes it will
devote its labor to.  But the changes *are* shared -- they're
available both physically and legally.  It's our choice not to provide
labor, or not to accept universally acceptable terms.  Please let's
use more accurate rhetoric, and not cut off our nose to spite our
face.

Footnotes: 
[1]  With apologies to Alice and the Restaurant.