>> Swift has proven it can thrive in secrecy, so I don't think the whole open >> community is a necessity — but as it is now, we should hold transparency in >> high esteem and not start faking democracy. > > I’m confused, what are you saying? No decision has been made here, I’m not > aware of any “secrecy” issue. Sorry, it could be that my words don't express exactly what I wanted to say. The first part is just about the closed-source past, which brought us Swift as we know it now (a big thank you for that; I'm really very happy about it).
For me (I guess for others as well :) the decision process is a black box, but I expect the proposals have impact on it — so proposers have some responsibility. Loïc and I already had a short conversation, and I have no accusations against him, but rather wanted to criticize a tool that can be instrumentalized easily: There has been a poll about which keyword to choose as replacement, and that made his proposal the target for my word of warning… I guess most of us agree that surveys have to be taken with a grain of salt, and I think their use should be discouraged for most situations. Polls itself can be manipulated in many ways (bias of the author, fake votes…), and there are no rules how to handle the result (an author could cite a survey that supports his standpoint, but he might as well ignore a result he doesn't like). Of course, the core team is not bound to the result of any vote, but bad decisions aren't my main concern: I don't know how this community will evolve, but I guess there will be natural controversy in the future, there will be temptation to support opinions with unfair methods — and there will be people suspecting or accusing others of using such methods… All those bad things are most likely unavoidable, but clear rules could help keeping them at bay. So, I hope my language has been better this time, and that Swift grows up to be a healthy open source project with a great community! (and to make sure I don't get things wrong again: It is already quite healthy and great ;-) Best regards, Tino _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list swift-evolution@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
