> 2009/3/30, Daniel Seuffert <i...@praxis123.de>: > > Isn't there any OpenBSD guy defending Mr. Wim Vandeputte, a man > > having promoted OpenBSD year in and year out and having supported the > > project in Europe like nobody else probably? > > If they are as intelligent as I guess, they will not communicate on > this list. Making this public was a huge mistake.
We have been trying to get Wim to catch up on payments for more than two years -- privately. The European orders were shut down. Then I made an announcement that after 4.6 Wim would not get product, but 4.5 would ship from him. Then after a few smaller postings, Wim posted a large web page which is his side of the story, with hundreds of lines of details. So who made it public? > Theo, is this essentially correct? > > <quote src="http://accounting.kd85.com";> > For 4.5, I thought to be better prepared so I wired EUR 20.000 to the > Computer Shop of Calgary account before anybody even asked me (I > haven't gotten the proforma invoice yet). False. He is conflating two things. That is the 4.5 pre-payment, plus a requirement we established 2 years ago that he must pay off a component of his past debt before new transactions are processed. This is a very normal way of forcing clients to get caught up on their bills. Of course the old requirement was that he pay more than such a small component of the debt, as in, around 20,000 in _debt_ + the pre-order. But he's clawed back the amount he pays each time, and now he wants you all to believe that this is a big amount. It is a nothing but a kibble on the way to complete payment. > With a bit of luck by the > time 4.5 would officially ship, the extra orders could have brought in > EUR 10.000 that I planned on wiring in May to further fund the > project. Why should new profits by him be used to pay the debt? Why should the money he paid on his brand new house in Belgium when he was supposed to be so poor not pay for it? Why does he use the phrase "fund the project". What he really means is "repay my debt". Or perhaps he means "repay a small part of my substantial debt". > The day the money arrived, Theo decided to suspend the > European orders and send me no CDs or artwork. False. In fact, he already had the artwork since Austin had already sent it to him accidentally around that time, against my advisement. You will note that Wim says he didn't get didn't get the art, yet then he says he already has them made. Which is it? Both cannot be true. Secondly, I have no idea when the money came in. I have nothing to do with the Computer Shop finances except as an employee. The European order site was shut down because Wim had nearly begged Bob -- a volunteer -- to shut it down in response to some minor complaint he had about how donations are mixed in with the transactions; he did not like how the order process mixed them together and he wanted it isolated for his ease. His insults to Bob, were just over the top and a decision was made fairly quickly that enough was enough, and he would not receive one more order through our assistance. > Note the choice of > going public not before the pre-orders but after 252 people have > already placed and paid their orders, essentially screwing all of > them. Wim has known that he is in arrears for payment for many years. He has known he has the sweetest possible deal with all the tshirt sales and poster sales going straight into his pocket, and also the free access / tables at the open source conferences in Europe to sell his Soekris business. Perhaps has made made inventory errors, but he certainly should not have made these errors with money that was due the project. When should we have cut him off? What month would have been best? After he's printed too large a collection of tshirts for the next release, or when? Or did he perhaps know he could be insulting towards us all because we would never cut him off at such a period? Perhaps he guessed wrong. > Later he changed his mind and decided to send me some CDs, but > it's not clear how many. In the meantime I have not had any > communication or email explaining what the deal is. That is also completely false. There was never a decision made about not sending Wim the CDs he had already ordered; Austin and I were still discussing how we would handle the consequences of cutting him off. And as I posted a week ago, he will get what he needs for his orders. There was never a statement that he would get none to fullfill already placed orders. > The suspension of the ordering site was not discussed or announced to > me. I had to read it in cvs commits like all of you. In private correspondance 20090320184601.gl31...@rho.kd85.com, Wim was goading Bob to either fix some minor problem or shut the page down. A few days later the decision was made to not fix the minor problem, but instead shut it down. Bob was making it increasingly clear to me that it was either him or Wim, but I was also really concerned with the mails I saw, and I believe I chose wisely even if not all the details of my decision are apparently to everyone. > To add insult to injury, Theo had first removed my cvs account. False timeline. Wim's cvs account was disabled more than a year ago, because he was not a developer. He was a distributor who was operating in bad faith, and thus did not need access to the development environment. > This > means I no longer have access to the script that runs the ordering > site and for every single modification I need to go through Bob. False description of the mechanics. The ordering system is entirely disjoint from the entire infrastructure. Just traceroute to the parts of the openbsd network, ie. cvs.openbsd.org, www.openbsd.org, and https.openbsd.org. They could not be further apart from each other. I don't even have access to the ordering system, since it has nothing to do with me. So I did not disable his account there. I have nothing to do with OpenBSD orders. I just build release material, and then authorize the production of product which is sold by a distributor who pays me a salary. > Now > Bob is a nice guy but he's busy and it's impossible to get things > done. True or false; I don't know. It is obvious that Bob shut down Wim's order subsystem account months ago (probably because he stopped trusting Wim around that time too), and then also the order page a few days ago.... So is Bob a busy guy, a nice guy, or a deliver of insult and injury? You guys can decide this point. > So this posed loads of conflicts where I was looking for new > ways to pressure Bob to get off his ass and *fix* problems (instead of > being able to do it myself). False. Wim has no right to pressure Bob who runs a free service that collects https orders in a secure system, and cryptographically transmits them to the sellers. Bob runs this service on his own as a free service for the project and two distributors, and obviously understands that a distributor / reseller who is behind in payment has no right to pressure him; they should get caught up first. I approve of what he did, of course. > When have you last spoken to Wim personally? Not for a year. Why should I? The Computer Shop had made it quite clear to Wim that he was behind in payments and should get caught up. Wim had decided years ago to ignore the agreement he made with me to send back 60% of the CD money to the OpenBSD project via whatever means, and he instead used it for conferences and tshirt stock. He was made fully aware that this was a violation of trust back then.
