This is no way to act on a development mailing list

For those of you reading this now, this is not the original post. The email I had posted here was replied to, the author acknowledged his mistake, and politely asked that I take down his email. He's a well-meaning person, and I can't bash well meaning people. I've removed all references to him.

I've just unsubscribed from the GNOME Shell mailing list. Now I know I've been saying I'd do for quite some time, but the mailing list has degraded into a location for petty insults and disrespectful behavior.

Have a look at the message he was replying to, and the entire thread. This is a development mailing list. Or rather, it is in name. But it has morphed into a hotbed for rants by users who dislike the Shell, who dislike design decisions, or even who don't appreciate how much work has gone into the software (regardless of whether you like it, show some respect for the people who have put in substantial amounts of time and effort to make it in the first place). There do still exist useful and informative threads. But they have been outnumbered by whining and hissy fits.

There are tons of cases of this behavior, and it's not limited to non-developers as well. Here's one such example.

The first person who does this on hummstrumm-dev is going to be plonked faster than they can type the phrase "completely unacceptable".

Privacy and Control in Social Networks (a.k.a, Why Andover would be smart to adopt DIASPORA*)

DIASPORA* is a distributed social network built on Free/Open Source Software. (Image by Flickr user horiavarlan.)

For a week, I was away from Facebook, voluntarily deactivating my account. Did I miss it? I can say I missed a few contacts. Overall, though, not at all.

What's wrong with Facebook? Socially, I mean, most everyone is on it. But behold the Facebook terms of service (TOS). My favorite telling quote:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.