On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 19:04, Scott A Crosby wrote: > To everyone here, give the guy a break.
Seconded! He gave an honest and unemotional response to what are surely a huge number of (probably less than unemotional) responses to his review. I daresay that he'll be a little more careful next time (especially once he's done experiencing the /. effect...). At the risk of getting myself flamed to death, especially since I'm a new "face" on this list (but as someone mentioned earlier today, this is a friendly list, right? Right?) <low key rant> One thing that the Open Source community suffers from quite often is that we often forget to cool our jets and think before we fire off a testy letter to whomever has offended our sensibilities. That's not to say that we shouldn't call someone out when they present slanted statistics/ reviews/ etc or are just plain wrong, but there's a diplomatic way to do that, and an emotionally satisfying way. Usually, these methods are a odds with one another, and far too often the emotionally satisfying method wins out and we end up (further) alienating those whose support we need in order to see continued adoption of OSS in the business world (and therefore continued job security for we who *like* to "tinker" with our systems to make them work better). Now (and I hear the flamethrowers warming up out there... hang on a sec and I'll get where I'm going- then you can send all the flames you like if you still want to) one of the biggest hurdles to OSS in the enterprise (or anywhere else, for that matter) is that the OSS community has a reputation, only partly deserved, for being a little, how shall we say, "direct" in our treatment of those whose viewpoints we don't share. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for calling a spade a spade when the time is right- if the author had come back with a nasty open letter and said "piss on you all, I'm right and your software simply sucks", I'd say "Flame away - he asked for it". He didn't however, and jumping on the "me too" bandwagon (and yes, I see the irony in that statement) and further flaggelating the guy serves no purpose other that to give supporting evidence to the OSS community detracters (Ballmer and friends leap to mind: "Did you see how they crucified that poor guy? Jeez. Hey- I know - let's put that in our next marketing campaign: Don't want to deal with treatment like this? Just buy M$ stuff. _We'll_ never flame you...."). And give a brief moment of "Take that, dammit" to the poster. At this point, I'm sure the author is hiding under his bed every time his email client tells him "You've got spam (er, mail)". <flame on!> Just my $0.02... (Hiding under my bed now...;^) Rubin -- Rubin Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> RB Technologies
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