While I agree that the GNOME Foundation is a private organization that, in practice, has the right to decide who is allowed to participate without talking about

While I agree that the GNOME Foundation is a private organization that, in practice, has the right to decide who is allowed to participate without talking about that process publicly, that doesn't mean that should be exempted from negative consequences to their collective reputation for exercising that right in a way that makes it appear that they are not a transparent organization and operate as a kind of star chamber internally. Not only does it go against long-established principles and ideals of our society in a lot of ways, to the point that I think even many proprietary software developers would be somewhat uncomfortable with decisions about justice and punishment taking place behind closed doors (even if they're fine with source code being closed), but it goes against the spirit of open source, which is rooted as a concept in the notion that transparency is good and opacity is harmful. I am concerned that the idea that victims should have their identities kept private to protect them from harassment is increasingly used as an excuse to punish people suspected of wrongdoing in private proceedings and not disclose much if anything about the evidence or the nature of the proceedings, and instead demanding that the public trust authority figures behind closed doors. That is, transparency and openness seem to be vanishing from society in general, in favor of an emphasis on security and a victim's right to privacy, which means we're back to a system where most proceedings take place behind closed doors. Sure, official legal proceedings might still be open, but almost everything of importance these days happens within the domain of very large private organizations and their regulations, meaning that their internal processes affect us almost as much as laws do in some cases. I worry not only for the future of GNOME, but also for the future of open source and open societies based on the principles of transparency in general. It's possible that the Internet making everything so connected and causing information to flow so rapidly has made it so that it is too dangerous to be open, and thus freedom and transparency are ultimately being killed by the combination of technology and private ownership favoring authoritarian approaches and unilateral, backroom decision making.