[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo calendar for tracking Gentoo events

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Richard Freeman posted on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:04:54 -0500 as excerpted:

> On 03/10/2010 04:42 PM, Duncan wrote:
>> So a gmail account is now considered mandatory for Gentoo devs, at
>> least if they want calendar access?
>>
>> What about those who might think that Google knows enough about them
>> with search and the web crawling and database correlation Google does,
>> and whatever ad serving might leak thru, and object to having a gmail
>> account on principle?
>>
> Honestly, Google calendar works well enough that I'm not sure that I
> like the idea of re-inventing the wheel.  Maybe if somebody designed
> some kind of open calendar access protocol that was comparable.

I guess that's two separate objections.  One is simply to the /assumption/ 
that /everyone/ (well, all Gentoo devs interested in calendar activities, 
at least) has or at least doesn't object to getting a gmail account.  I 
suppose that's corrected to some degree by the posting itself, but it's an 
assumption that really shouldn't be taken lightly, IMO.

The other is to google /requiring/ a gmail account in the first place, but 
of course, gentoo really doesn't have much to do with that, except to 
possibly refuse to use the tools so made available (gratis), which could 
be argued should be done, but is it worth it in practice?  I don't know.

The first one is what really hit me here tho.  Why the assumption?  If 
it'd have been made explicit that this was something some might have an 
issue with and they'd simply need to choose, it wouldn't have been so bad 
as the issue would have been recognized.  So it was the simple assumption 
I found most offensive, and as I said, my post corrected that to some 
degree, so...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman