[License-discuss] META: threading and topic drift

[John Cowan]

Sorry about that.

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 1:45 PM Kevin P. Fleming <kevin+osi at km6g.us> wrote:

Please try to stay on topic. Patrick started this thread with a very
> straightforward request for license stewards to provide information
> about their licenses, and now the thread is rehashing preferences for
> one license over another, OSL vs. GPL, etc, and hypothesizing what a
> future OSL could be. None of that is inappropriate for this list, but
> it's off topic for this thread, and that makes it harder for people
> who want to participate in specific discussions to do so.


Most threaded mail readers thread on the Subject: line rather than the
In-Reply-To: header, so changing the subject will be sufficient.

Yes, the 'delete' key is right there, and it's not hard to press it,
> but when someone posts a message which is both on-topic and off-topic
> (as happens often), readers have no choice but to read through it all
> to find the parts that are relevant.
>

As long as people write messages on more than one topic, responses will be
on more than one topic.  Nobody's going to write several replies on *any*
system to the same message.

Would it be better if people always raised an issue in one post, made a
proposal to resolve it in another, and posted their arguments in a third?
It would.  But they won't, not without a *lot* more support (see <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system> for what that
would look like).


John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
In my last lifetime, I believed in reincarnation;
in this lifetime, I don't.  --Thiagi
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