Clarification about secrecy and SoC

I think my previous post was a bit misunderstood.

It wasn’t referred mainly at Google’s Summer of Code thing, actually, that was just a single note in the whole post, the minor one, too.

As I said, I understand the reason for which soc-admins is private (higher signal/noise ratio, no problem of talking of internal method for evaluation and so on). I also understand the needing for hiding the list of applications to public until the final list is decided, at least to an extent.

But this last one bit, together with default to hidden comments made me feel more secrecy than required, this is not saying that I can’t stand SoC, as someone seems to have understood. SoC just reminded me of this stuff by mental association. By the way, Grant already suggested me that the default to private of comments might be considered an UI design glitch in Summer of Code application, after all there were quite a few, and the code was restructured “on the fly” more than one time. I’ll try to submit my feedback about that on the SoC list, maybe I’m not the only one that would have liked a different default (again, I’m not saying I’m against disabling private comments, just I’d like it defaulted to public), and for next year Goole can find a better solution for that part.

What I can’t really stand are personal or elitist secret projects that comes up from time to time, secrecy in handling stuff that might regard users and so on. For a more practical example, I didn’t like at all the idea of working on the Gentoo/Alt prefix support as a private thing, not up to the public. And I really didn’t like the flaming that happened when a note about that was sent to GWN (I was really happy that GWN talked about that actually).

This of course is just one example out of many that I might make.

Again, I want to clear up that I’m entirely happy and glad of Google Summer of Code, and I feel lucky to be able to take part of its mentoring. So I want to tell again that I’m sorry for not having been more clear to g2boojum, gerrynjr (who both brought to my attention the “not-that-clear” phrasing of my blog) and christel (who already expressed her opinion on the post’s comments).

P.S.: For a little note, if you looked at the tags for the old post, I didn’t put “SoC” there, as I though it wasn’t really related to that…