It seems like that until you start asking questions. Then you discover that AMP4Email is controlled by Gmail team, that you can't get a straight answer to save your life, and when they don't like the topic, they subtly threaten the Code of Conduct when no violations are occurring to indicate they are actively searching for an excuse to close down discussion.

AMP4Email has nothing to do with AMP as a validatable preloadable subset of HTML and the web packaging standard discussed in this article.

Posting some discussions in the open doesn't make it well-lit. There are many projects following this path where the real decisions are made in private meetings by people in the controlling companies. Open washing is not open source.

Indeed, while discussing AMP4Email, it seemed that, despite being a proposal in the AMP Project, all decisions for it's implementation were already made (and committed to) by the Gmail team, it had already been "reviewed" by a security team (although any such security protections are limited to Gmail's own internal protections, other implementers are on their own), and there seemed to be no opportunity for the greater email community to comment before these things were decided.

Having it up on GitHub after that doesn't really mean much. This is the same for Android and Chrome, of course.

Well, technically, it is. Open source doesn't imply governance by an independent standards body. There are just requirements for what counts as an open source license.

A project run by a "benevolent dictator for life" (like Python or Elm) is entirely compatible with open source. The same is true for a project run by a corporation (like React).

With difficult discussions being locked and limited to collaborators.

With the main answer to questions being, we can discuss this somewhere else, some-other (unknown) time in the future, usually in a more private setting. Unless pressed further.

Case in point: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457#issuecomm...

Or as carmforce(Ubl) so nicely put it. "our project, our rules" but those rules keep changing, are not public and the raised issue about defining/clearing up those rules is obviously not a priority.

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597#issuecomm...

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13603

> ... open-source with almost all discussion surrounding the project happening out in the open on their GitHub repo.

Yeah, well... "Open-source" in the sense that they throw something over the wall from time to time. "Almost all discussion" in the sense that they use a heavily-moderated public newsgroup for some things. It's better than completely internal development, I guess, but don't kid yourself: it's a PR exercise coupled to a near-complete capture of the RFC process.