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On Tuesday 20 July 2004 6:15 am, Chris Bainbridge wrote: |
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> When you act as a gentoo developer, with your |
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> gentoo email address, then people are going to assume that you represent |
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> gentoo. |
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To a limited extent. |
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Gentoo is a group of people working on software; not an |
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ideological/political platform. It's quite unnecessary (and ludicrous) |
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that someone would have to send from a different email address to express |
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their views -- what difference does that truly make? |
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Most people realize that open-source projects are mostly driven by |
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volunteers, and by that "open"-ness project/organization members are |
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entitled-- if not encouraged-- to express their own views on anything; |
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assuming of course they don't make a point of antagonizing people. |
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This is the beauty of open source software development: in theory, it's |
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apolitical-- most of our peers don't care about how we dress, our |
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eccentricities, our views-- as long as we produce something and can manage |
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to get along with others. At least agree to disagree. The reality is |
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that we get mucked up in politics too; or more accurately, people who |
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"speak up" merely to put their thumbprint on things as a way of saying |
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"hi, I'm here, and I'm Participating." These days, moreso than the past |
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7-8 years I've been involved in the open source "stuff", I've seen more |
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people trying to justify their existence by debating countless minutiae on |
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public mailing lists. |
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I'm going to expand the scope of this reply, so bear with me. |
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I won't undermine the argument that perhaps a mistake was made WRT "The |
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Mentoring Situation", but it has probably been blown (way) out of |
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proportion. Ultimately it doesn't matter who mentors who as long as it |
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gets done appropriately. Devrel is the group that makes those decisions. |
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People impacted by those decisions have a basic right to know why, but |
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inevitably everyone will miscommunicate something sometime. |
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If someone feels devrel (or anyone else) isn't handling <foo> correctly, |
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write a complaint to -dev. Assume first it was an honest mistake. Ask |
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for clarification. Launching ad hominems on mailing lists is |
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counterproductive. Gentoo is a human effort; mistakes will be made, so |
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there's no point in trying to embarrass someone. Have the facts straight |
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first before assuming that someone has done something specifically to |
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screw us over. |
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"Can't we all just get along?" (Rodney King on the L.A. Riots) |
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When conspiracy theories/labels like "thought police" get bandied about, |
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that's not addressing issues on a case-by-case basis-- that's attacking |
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your peers. Disappointing. We're all volunteers, with the same basic |
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goal of trying to make Gentoo better. |
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Cheers, |
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Dylan Carlson [absinthe@g.o] |
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Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x708E165F |
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-- |
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gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
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