The Trolling on the freebsd- lists

[Rahul Siddharthan]

[ancient history irrelevant to DragonFly, but...]
Bill Huey said on Jan  6, 2004 at 17:15:21:
> 
> You don't pay another volunteer in a group without doing the proper
> group research about who does what developement/political work and it
> should have been discussed with all core members, both technical and
> political. In this case, I found out about these actions second hand
> on the mailing list without them directly discussing it with me. I was
> kind of wondering what the hell happened, held back and angry response,
> asked the FreeBSD Foundation what the hell was going on with that, and
> determined this person is a complete asshole when he "didn't like my
> attitude" verses dealing with circumstances professionally.

I remember the thread last year, and I must say the "held back an
angry response" (assuming that's what you meant to type) is not true.
Your initial mails to JDP (which he'd posted on his webpage, though
they're no longer there) were quite abusive and inflammatory.  That
doesn't justify his reaction, but I think you'll earn more sympathy in
life if you control your language.

In addition, your grievance may not have seemed so bad to a lot of
people.  Some people get paid for hacking on FreeBSD (or Linux or
whatever), some don't.  True of all volunteer efforts.  If Red Hat
pays Stephen Tweedie to hack on the filesystem, you don't see other
filesystem hackers going ballistic over that.

Your situation was probably nastier and more hurtful to you, because
of your close involvement to the group and the feeling that you were
being somehow "excluded", and indeed many people (including me) did
post to the list in your support.  But if you ever find yourself in
such a situation again, don't react the way you did then.  Bad
language annoys everyone including your friends.

> > If you want to contribute to the future, then write up some
> > cool code for DragonFly, things that will make all FreeBSD
> > users green with envy (and all OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux
> > users).  When it comes to *proving* how cool you are in the
> > open-source world, you do it with working code, and not with
> > constant personal attacks over what has happened in the past.
> 
> If this case was that simple, I'd have done this by now, but this little
> known story in the BSDs makes that above suggestion a inappropriately
> mild in this situation. It's really about whether I trust a development
> group to do the right thing in this context or not, and therefore
> start developing for a particular group. This is a very legitmate
> concern.

Your contributions will be in the CVS logs, most people don't get more
recognition than that and most don't get paid.  And with free software,
whether BSD or GPL, other people can (as Matt pointed out) pick up
your ball, play with it, and quite possibly make money from it.  If
that's a problem, free software is not for you :-(  

Rahul