Who is saying people can't kick around ideas in public? Not me. That's a strawman argument. What I'm hearing is some folks saying that ALL ideas MUST be kicked around, not only in public, but specifically in the forums.
So ... if someone e-mails me a new idea in public I'm to tell them to cease and desist and post to the forums? I don't think so. Well, no, I won't do so, actually. That's doesn't fit my idea of how sound development marches forward. People need to have some freedom to work in ways that best suit them. This is true in professional settings as well as a loosely-coupled project like this. If you try to squeeze people into one tightly defined way of working, you'll just drive off a lot of creative people.
Plans must be subjected to public feedback, I've made it clear that I believe that. But idea-thrashing shouldn't be burdened with this requirement.
Ben doesn't mention one important thing in regard to dotLRN, and that's the fact that a lot of the direction setting etc he's talking about has been set in a *contractual* environment. Sloan is driving much of the UI based on their existing system used by a large number of people in the school, and since they're footing the bill that's their privilege.
That doesn't mean that OF couldn't've been more open about things. Publishing an overview of the new portal system early on would've been welcomed by a lot of people, for instance, more than seeing the code (which after all didn't exist in the very beginning).
But any thought that the community rather than Sloan could've driven the dotLRN external design, at least, ignored the fact that Sloan's footing the bill.
Are we to demand that every client-financed project that results in GPL'd packages be planned with community assistance? If we do, I would predict that financing for GPL'd packages would dry up quickly while financing for closed-source packages would increase.
