The madness of ignoring people

[Vincenzo Ciancia <vincenzo_mlRE.MOVE@yahoo.it>]

On Saturday 20 November 2004 20:17, malc wrote:
> I had hoped that this will
> result in some reaction, if not from Inria developers then from OCaml
> users, alas this was not the case.

I don't understand why academic environments producing free software 
often tend to deliberately ignore people contributions. Maybe it is 
normal that your feature has no users (yet), and so there is no people 
interested, but it's absolutely NOT normal that people at inria just 
ignore it - just like it's not normal that they sometimes don't answer 
at all nontrivial technical questions about ocaml that _only them_ can 
answer. 

I know, compilers and mailing lists are for free, but there is not a 
wide support network for ocaml, as there is, for example, for many 
software projects such as gcc, or the GNU operating system and so on, 
so the only place where somebody can ask for help about ocaml is here.

And to get back on your issue about the patch, I see it's frustrating to 
be just ignored, and it's a pity to force people, who might have worked 
hard, and for free, in _their_ free time, to stop contributing, because 
they get frustrated by being ignored, without at least explaining the 
reason. I've seen this on other mailing lists in the past, and in case 
someone is going to ask, no, it's not about contributions I made (there 
is no such thing :) ) - but of course I asked unanswered non-trivial 
technical question which I think is the other side of the same coin 
(wondering if this phrase makes sense in english, translated in italian 
it does).

V.