Avoid Mystery Process

Although the discussions around adding any particular new committer must be confidential, the rules and procedures themselves need not be secret. In fact, it’s best to publish them, so people realize that the committers are not some mysterious Star Chamber, closed off to mere mortals, but that anyone can join simply by posting good patches and knowing how to handle herself in the community. In the Subversion project, we put this information right in the developer guidelines document, since the people most likely to be interested in how commit access is granted are those thinking of contributing code to the project.

— Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

Consumer Security Advice

Here’s an attempt at consumer security advice that I saw at a railway station recently. Apparently, secure sites are denoted by “https//” (sic). And it conflates a secure connection with trustworthiness. It’s good that people are trying, but we have a way to go…