Re: Support for launching the FSF forge

[Karl-Philipp Richter]

Am 04.04.20 um 20:20 schrieb bill-auger:> i would characterize the plan
more as:
> "lowering the barrier-to-entry" than
That it's a more convenient description of my motivation and I'm
adopting it.

Thanks for you're insights. I'm aware of the widespread of mailing-list
based remote development in the free software community including the
flagship projects, like Linux. My understanding of appropriate doesn't
mean that I think that it's impossible to develop software with mailing
lists only.

I also experienced that

> many people consider mailing lists alone, to be completely
adequate for remote collaboration and software development

However, I see this as a problem, not as a reasonable justification of
the current situation. I causes an immense loss of possible
contributions to free software as well as time. You're making some good
points about acceptance of new tools and popularity, but they apply
generically to everything we can think of. I agree absolutely that doing
something for the sake of keeping up with the times only has any value
if one is referring to an improvement without downsides by this.

Important is the value of generic workflows. Nevertheless, I'd like to
stress that most features of web-platform-based development can't be
achieved by mailing-list, e.g. basic aspects as simple as keeping a
focus on your personal involvement or tracking duplicates (Debian has a
way, but it's far from one click). People expect these features because
they great. They know how email works (not as well as a Linux
contributor, but they understand the concept) and see that the workflows
can't be built with a mailing list. Again, that doesn't mean that
there's a logical contradiction in software development taking place
only on mailing lists.

Anyway, if more time needs to pass for discussion inside FSF/GNU, then
so be it. I don't want to be a part of it any more than I am already
with the post. I'm offering my support to test the result and contribute
to the rollout.

Best regards
Kalle

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