On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:38:57 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:
Aloha,
Respectfully, I disagree. Fortunately, we're not required to agree on all things. That would be awfully boring.
[bunch of ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks]
Nice that you put it that way ... shows how much respect you have!
Well, when someone writes to me things like: "Hah ... maybe you killed Klaas already because he didn't contribute in the way of your simple minded ideas!" and "Yeeeeeehaaaw ... just because I'm not that know as Greg makes me less important. Nice statement!" and "More howling ... Are you actually sure what you are talking about?" and so on....then yes, I tend to tune out. It's a character flaw of mine. And yeah, let's make no bones about the fact that the difference between "fsck" and "f*ck" is that you used 's' and I used '*' to replace a 'u'. We both know that. So when someone says 'fsck U', we both know *exactly* what is meant.
Clearly you've made up your mind and aren't interested in changing it. You appear to be just interested in shouting and swearing at people.
Your opinion ... good to know as well.
I'm happy to be proven wrong about that by having an actual discussion.
Quite honestly, I don't care if you *founded* S.u.S.E. *Nothing* gives you the right to treat others like that. Community is based on people having some degree of mutual respect for each other, and being able to disagree without being disagreeable.
But you have the right to piss us off ... you have the right that people call me late at night and ask me "What the fsck is going on there!" You have the right to call me names. You have the right to talk shit!
No, I don't. What's more, I didn't. I was very careful not to, and if you took something that I said as calling you names, talking shit, or asking you to 'check in' or provide me with some sort of status update, then my apologies. I actually do not operate under the misapprehension that my voice is anything but another voice in the room. I don't see myself as having any authority in the project (in the forums, yeah, I do - I'm one of the administrators).
And I don't mind if you actually invented the internet.
Which is why I don't like to make a big deal about my experience in online communities. I've been around online communities long enough to recognise that for the purposes of a discussion like this, that actually doesn't have any relevance.
When I read your name I think about the muppets ...
Yeah, I get that a lot. For over 40 years, actually. I once worked for a guy named Steven King. When he hired me, I suggested that we produce a muppet version of Cujo - it was something neither of us had heard before. :) Most people's first reaction is "Aren't you the muppet guy?" to which my tired response often is to check my pulse and say "Nope, I'm still alive. Henson ain't.".
show me just a single line of code where you contributed!
While I can read and understand code (having been a CompSci major at university and having taught myself from a fairly young age), coding isn't my strong suit. Here's the thing, though. The current membership rules - as imperfect as they are - are intended to recognise that people contribute in different ways. My contribution, for example, is through participation in the openSUSE forums as staff, with some visible and some not-so visible aspects (which recently has involved occasionally fixing PHP code in the NNTP gateway for the forums that's been broken by an update). I think we can agree that contribution is important. We may differ on what constitutes contribution or what contributions are more valuable than others (though I think we'd agree that coding is the *key* contribution), but contribution is the important thing. Reading over what you've written so far, here's what I see behind what I originally ascribed (perhaps mistakenly and/or unfairly) as "ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks" as your primary issues and concerns: 1. You've been around for a long time and have written a fair amount of code that's in the modern openSUSE distribution. You've also written books, articles, and other stuff. You feel that should be recognized and acknowledged, and are concerned that changes to the already imperfect system may lose that. 2. You very strongly feel that not voting in board elections or whatever the project decides to vote for should not be a criteria for continued membership. 3. You are concerned by the idea that "having an opensuse.org e-mail address" is tied specifically to "being a member" and that "being a member" is tied to a set of criteria that you feel may at some point would cause you to lose your "member" status, and thus your opensuse.org e-mail address. That's a means of contact for your professional network, and that's important to you not just personally but professionally. Losing that address would cause you pain and problems. How am I doing so far? Continuing... 4. You don't want to feel like you're 'accountable' to anyone - this is a hobby, not a job. As such, you strongly feel that the idea of "membership" really doesn't have a lot of meaning; you don't value it, and you maybe even don't want to value it. You just want to get on with writing code and not be bothered by "project politics". 5. You don't want your fate in the project being decided by people you don't know and who don't know you. You've been there, done that, and it caused you pain (and possibly some hardship). 6. You don't want an automated system to remove anyone with no recourse because they failed to complete some stupid trivial administrative task (for whatever reason) that says "Yes, I was actually active on this last release, just in case you didn't notice". 7. Discussing changes to what constitutes a 'member' upsets you, possibly because the status quo is more or less working for you and you don't want that to break - you would, however, like to see some things fixed about it (like difficulty in resetting the e-mail address the opensuse.org address forwards to - a tangible issue that's perhaps been neglected and probably has a simple solution). I'd guess you probably also see it as a 'fake' contribution to discuss because it's not about the code, which is where your focus is. Now, based on that interpretation of what you've written, a few comments on each from my perspective: 1. First and foremost, *thank you*. Really, I sincerely mean it. I have used SUSE since SUSE Professional 9.2 or thereabouts (since 2003; like you, I was employed by Novell, and I switched from using RedHat in 2003). I was happy on RedHat, but switching to SUSE Pro was like night and day. I don't know what software you've written, but that you've written code that I use and am happy and prefer to use is something I certainly appreciate. As a fellow author (I've got a couple of co-authorship and contributing author credits myself), I know what goes into writing. I've often said that "I love having written, but I dislike the actual writing process", because even with a subject one knows very well, taking that knowledge and translating it into something that can be sold in written form takes talent. Douglas Adams had it right - the process of writing involves sitting down in front of a computer and staring intently at the screen until your forehead bleeds (well, he said 'typewriter', but you get the idea). To be able to code *and* write to publication quality? That's a rare gift indeed. I think it's reasonably fair and accurate to assert that those who actually write the openSUSE software are key contributors and their contributions absolutely, positively, without question *should not be overlooked*. Without the developers, *nothing* in this project could happen. No developers = No openSUSE project. Period, end of story. 2. I absolutely agree. Voting or not voting in the election of the board should not be a criteria for continued membership. I perhaps was unclear by saying voting was a 'responsibility' of membership - that wasn't intended to imply that members *must* vote. Part of any legitimate voting process includes the idea that one can abstain, either explicitly (by voting "none of the above" if there is such an option on the ballot) or implicitly (by just not voting). I don't think that anyone actually proposed that members *must* vote. I think, though, it's important to discern between those who abstain and those who don't vote out of apathy, lack of interest, or because they're no longer actually involved in the project. Identifying the difference between the two is important to recognising that your abstention has value, and the intent of your abstention is easier to note as a result of knowing who's active and who's inactive. If you have a 10 person pool voting for something, but don't know who's active and who's not, if you have a vote of 3-2 with 5 non-votes, if all 5 of those non-votes are treated as abstentions, then one may fix a problem that doesn't exist (that of why there wasn't participation). If you find out that 4 of those non-votes are due to people having moved on to something else, then you can more accurately decide what to do with an effective 3-3 deadlock (arguably not the *best* example, but it's almost 1:30 AM here and I have to get up in about 4 hours). Of course, with a voting option of "decline to vote", that becomes less of an issue. 3. This is a reasonable concern. It's something that went through my mind as I suggested that perhaps the original "member" status be retained for those who joined the project in the early days. I'd even go a step further to say that the opensuse.org e-mail address' tie to membership should be one solely of "granted when one becomes a member". Never removed, as long as the domain is active - for that very reason. 4. It strikes me that if my first three interpretations are accurate, that the solution to your situation basically is encapsulated in the above paragraph. That should be doable, I would think. I would also go so far as to say that those who do make the decision about what membership means ultimately should strongly weight that input, because that *is* an important part of the discussion. 5. Who *would* want to relive an unpleasant memory? Without going into a lot of detail, I understand - I once raised concerns about my own boss' competence once, and I got burned for it. I was essentially told as a result of calling attention to the fact that the boss was unqualified to do the job and was destroying the team "there's the door; you can go through it, or we can push you through it." Bottom line, I can see why you're concerned, especially when combined with the prospect of your professional network knowing to contact you through an e-mail address that you perceive could go away as a result of some bureaucrat deciding your contributions weren't "worthy" of continued membership. That is a legitimate concern. In retrospect, I probably would have reacted as strongly as you had if that had been my interpretation of what was happening. "Here we go again....", right? And what's more, you care about this not just for yourself, but for others who make contributions similar to your own. You don't want them to be nameless/faceless/ignored because you value their contributions very highly. 6. I don't believe a *fully* automated system has even been proposed. In fact, proposals have explicitly said "removal should/must be a manual process". In my own experience in expiring instructors from an instructor program for inactivity, there was a *lot* of manual work because what I inherited was not maintained well (I didn't actually take over from my predecessor - there was a multi-year gap when nobody managed the program - so some similarity to the current situation here, based on what Chuck wrote about the membership situation earlier). That's why the bar for re-entry needs to be lower than the initial bar for entry (and yes, I'd argue that there *should* be requirements for entry into membership, not just for the reasons Bryen said with regards to the foundation, there are other reasons as well.) 7. As I said, contributions come in different forms from different people. We probably agree that contribution is important, but will differ on what constitutes a valued contribution. As long as your 'status quo' needs are understood and met at the outcome (so there's no significant effect on your ability to continue doing what you do best), I don't see that this should be an issue for you. I understand you not wanting to waste a lot of your time on something you don't see as important, but at the same time not wanting to have a change in the current status of your membership affect your ability to contribute to the project in the way you see as most important - writing code. That's fair. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org