On 20/08/11 21:00, Rob Weir wrote:
On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
1. One has to do with [email protected] where this is a personal forwarding
set up for some user (or entity) and it forwards to another e-mail address. If
these are preserved, forwarding them to some other email address to then be
forwarded to the original entity does not make a lot of sense. The issue here
is that the entity is known by that email address and has connections that
access that entity by that email address.
It is a good idea to preserve that service so that the entities that have use
of the individual ones can somehow manage their forwarding. I would not want
to figure out how to retire it until later, and with considerable warning.
Having an individual's e-mail address disappear is not a pleasant experience.
... How does this help us develop and publish open source software? ...
There seems little point in developing any FLOSS package which doesn't
meet the needs of its user population, as we will end up with an unused
product. I repeat that OpenOffice.org targets the general PC-owning
population as its user-base. This is very different to Apache Server,
Traffic Server, Subversion and the other Apache projects that typically
have a niche IT proficient and often IT professional user population.
Clearly, the success of any FLOSS package depends on the support of a
committed core of able developers. However, the success of OOo also
depends on a wide community of contributors, documentation and tutorial
developers, community supporter and even just power-users who can
evangelise the product.
We have historically encouraged this community to use their oo.o
mailboxes to foster a sense of identity. I know that I used to use my
[email protected] address a lot: answering end-user emails and as my
email address for a range of forums, wikis and similar services. I was
and am proud to be associated with this project. However, because I
realise that the address might go away, I had to trawl through my emails
to work out which services I had subscribed to using [email protected] and
rehook them to another mailbox: a real pain -- but less painful than
suddenly finding out that I had become disconnected from them. So my
answer is that alienating our extended community of supporters would not
be something that we should do lightly. OOo depends on their support.
//Terry
