On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 10:25:11AM +0200, Christoph Ewering wrote: > I read this mailing list for some month now and one thing that really > annoyes me is your arrogant writing style. > Looks to me that you know a lot about linux but you know nothing about > politeness. > > Examples: Your "famous" last three words to this discussion or the > discussion about Darwin. > > > then why don't you just write a driver for it then, or shut up. > > As far as I know (maybe this is not far enought for this mailing list) a > mailing list is for exchange of knowledge and ideas and for discussions > of things that pertain to a mailing list. So why do you thing you have > the right to say to someone on this mailing list "shut up". > > Do you know about smileys? :-), :-(, etc. This makes live a lot easier. > > Hope you think about it and don?t be too angry, but I had to say this.
I fewel the need to reply to this, not necessarily to defend ethan as such, more to point out the problems with politeness on mailing lists. I shudder at the thought but I agree with a lot of what ESR said in a recent page he put up about how people should go about getting help on mailing lists. http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html He mentions in there that one cant really expect hackers to be incredibly polite, and in most areas where hackers have been restricted to politeness by rules on lists and discussion boards they have left to form other communities with out such restrictions. This is not because hackers are intrinsically rude or anything, it is more that hackers in free software communities expect an absolute right to free speech and thus restricting said speech in any manner is something they will not abide by. So the email you sent to ethan is perfectly alright as you are as entitled to your opinion as anyone, however dont expect anything from it as it is very important that people can still blow of steam or behave in such a manner as Ethan or others from time to time do. It is far more important to have people who want to help and are knoledgable around than to have a faultlessly polite but on the whole lazy/dumb community. Oh and by the way that thing ESR wrote really is a good read for people before they ask questions on mailing lists. See You Steve -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://wibble.net/~sjh Look Up In The Sky Is it a bird? No Is it a plane No Is it a small blue banana? Yes
