we devs are acting as gate keepers to ideas
well... that makes it even worse. in effect, you are saying that the developers are keeping certain information 'closed source'. certainly this is a violation of the GPL et al, if not in the letter of the law then certainly in spirit! is this stance any different to the high priests of ancient societies that used the control of knowledge to keep the population subservient?
Huh? Where did I write that we keep things “closed source”?!
is "gate keepers to ideas" not just a more prosaic way of saying 'closed source'? ideas, knowledge, being withheld or suppressed because those ideas are deemed 'bad' by a select group of experts.
The ideas, the knowledge can still be out there, you are after all free to do your own fork of FPC and implement any changes you envision. With FPC however we are working on
our vision of FPC and if there are ideas that agree with our vision then we'll integrate them, if not, we simply won't. But nobody stops you from implementing them yourself and distributing them yourself. This is true for
any open source project. Just think about Linus Torvalds as the ultimate gatekeeper of Linux. If he sees a change that he thinks doesn't fit with how Linux is supposed to work, he'll refuse the integration.
but at the same time, i do feel that (open source) developers should also be open about the internal workings of their projects. if someone asks "how can i modify it to do this", the developers should not say "that is a 'frickle scheme' (maintaining PascalDragon's keyboard mishap) but rather help out (where practical) anyone who wants to dig into the source code themselves. even if their changes will never go into the main source.
I mainly wanted to make clear that even if you'd implement this that it's very unlikely that this would become part of the main source. It has happened often enough that people were disappointed that they weren't told at an early stage of their work that their ideas/changes aren't deemed useful for the official source.
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