Privacy and the Cygwin/XFree86 mail archive

[Jason Molenda]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 12:22:41PM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

> If you expect Red Hat to remove anything from this machine, don't hold
> your breath.  My understanding is that the machine belongs to the Free
> Software Foundation, and is run by volunteers, some of which are Red
> Hat employees.  All Red Hat does is to offer resources to keep the
> machine running, such as power, location and connectivity.  Red Hat
> does not establish policies regarding the operation of this site.

Probably worth clarifying - this isn't really correct.  The machine,
the network bandwidth, and the system administration are all supplied
by Red Hat.  The site maintenance/development is done almost
exclusively by Red Hat, almost always in the form of Chris Faylor's
weekends. :-) The most obvious exception is Hans-Peter's gracious
work on the search engine for both gcc.gnu.org and sources.redhat.com.
(ObIDon'tWorkHere - I haven't worked for Red Hat for ~2 years)

At the same time, because sources.redhat.com and gcc.gnu.org are
the same machine, I think it behooves all the RH people with
administrative capabilities to behave in a manner consistent with
the FSF's principles.  The FSF and gcc don't give a hoot about the
Cygwin archives being modified, but they should be rightly concerned
if there's a prevailing cavalier attitude about message removal.
What if this guy had posted to a gcc list, and came to the RH
maintainers or RH management wanting his post removed?  With luck
that'd raise red flags in someone's mind and they would say, "Hey,
I can't do that", but if there's a established instances of this
being done on other lists it'll be all the easier to do it on a
gcc list as well.

Incidentally, someone should probably tell this fella to stop
putting his e-mail addresses in his .sig like that.  If he ever
did knowingly post to a sources/gcc mailing list, the mailing list
software would do the simple obfusciation of his addr in the headers,
but it never ever touches address-like things in message bodies.

> As soon as you disclosed your private information to someone you
> didn't know you could trust not to make it public, you effectively
> made it public.  If it hadn't got to the public mailing list, you
> might consider yourself lucky.

That's harsh, but I think it's an accurate assessment.  It wasn't
like he submitted a survey response to Red Hat and Red Hat's
marketing department blasted his letter across Usenet (which is
how it sounds when you read his note).

J