Re: My future GNUstep contribution

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hello Fred,

On 2021-07-16 23:34:03 +0200 Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:

> as some of you may have noticed I was on a break from the project for
> some time. This hiatus was caused by the way Greg reacted on the mail
> from Johannes on RMS. Just to state the obvious, I think that Johannes
> was wrong here, still he deserved a friendlier reply. I was not
> surprised that Johannes choose to quit the project. The tone on the
> GNUstep mailing lists, and sadly on many free software projects, is
> often very unfriendly.

I noticed it and I am sad about this. I did not like Johannes' 
considerations and was hurt by them - also because at the same time I 
read similar discussions on several Mailinglists of OS projects I am 
involved in.
In this specific case, I think Greg's answer was appropriate, but in 
other cases the tones on the mailing list weren't nice either, so I 
guess it is more the last drop in the bowl.

What I dislike especially is that these discussions and reactions that 
came from them overshadowed a very important thing, the release we did 
this year is one of the best we ever did. The work on MinGW-2 and 
64bit, the fixes in Big Endian encoding and many others are amazing 
and we should be proud of them, but things were put in the background.
The high quality of this release is thanks to you too, Fred, as well 
as Richard. We collaborated all together and it is to be proud of.

> After this I needed some time to think about what my role in such a
> project should be. Why would I subject myself to treatments in my 
> spare
> time that I would not accept in a payed position?

I have to agree with you - there is not much fun left in the 
discussion of our mailing lists, but also generally in other projects.
I think these hard past two years stressed all our souls, including 
mine, making us more suscepible, the pandemic affected our minds 
differently, but no-one was left unscathered.
But I also think there is some fundamental difference in Open Source 
today than 10 years ago... some signals were present before the 
pandemic, but it got worse.

> The result of all this thinking is that I still want to contribute to
> this project, for which I have worked more than twenty years. But I 
> will
> scale down my involvement. I would like to give up on chores that I
> never enjoyed and work on fun stuff like problem analysis and bug 
> fixing.

And I hope this can continue.

> There are three main jobs that I would like to pass on:
> - Maintainership of GNUstep gui and back. Here it would be great if
> somebody could at least take over the review of Greg's pull requests.
> Somehow we are not able to sort out our communication and this results
> in a rather frustrating experience for me.

I must admit it is not easy at all, but you are just good.

> If you are interested to take over one of these jobs, please contact 
> me
> directly. I will stay out of further mailing list discussion but will
> still be around to help developers and users with their issues.

I hope to continue to have the privilege to work with you on GNUstep 
and fix one bug after the other and improve it one piece at a time.
Maybe you can at least partially reconsider your decision - I don't 
see anybody in this project with your knowledge to be able to take 
over, but I want to discuss with this you privately.

The fact that I can type this answer on a full stack of FOSS, from the 
operating system up to GNUstep and GNUMail is partially als your and 
mine work and I want to continue pursue this improvement with you so 
that this freedom remains available for others who to not wish to get 
caught in Google Mail or the future Window Cloud.... or whatever else.


Riccardo

--
GNUMail running on GNUstep on OpenBSD/i386 Toshiba Tecra