Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 11:52:09 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time) From: Joshua IV <joshua@sublimity.net> To: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> Cc: freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG, <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <billh@gnuppy.monkey.org> Subject: Re: patchset 2 report (billh's resignation) Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.44.0302061120310.1804-100000@SW-WASE-SE1995D> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.20030206104124.jdp@polstra.com>
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Hi John, crew. As a somewhat newcomer to freebsd-java and an utter lurker, I think I can offer a pretty unbiased opinion about the whole deal. I feel compelled to, because I'm a big proponent of open-source software development, which is a big win for everyone, but like any relative of the Prisoner's Dilemma, it has some fragility. After reading through the relevant mail, both that intended to be public and that intended not to be public, it was pretty clear to me that Bill didn't want the job. Of course you can argue that that was after-the-fact-ism, but regardless he makes it obvious that his primary concern isn't the job, but is acknowledgement of his work and enough respect to at least give him a handwave during the process. I can understand if you missed that message amid the napalm bombardment, but that doesn't absolve the underlying sin, which is needing him to tell you in the first place. As a significant member of an organization so dependent on volunteer contribution (including your own), I'm sure you've read Homesteading the Noosphere by Eric Raymond (you have, haven't you?) http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_10/raymond/ in which he gives a very reasoned and reasonable analysis of the open-source development culture and what drives it. It is in essence a gift economy. And the primary coinage in a gift economy is respect and acknowledgement, for better or worse. As a putative legal representative of an essentially open-source project, this should be part and parcel of the way you do business, but you seem to have ignored it. Bill's work has been instrumental in us getting hotspot running in a production environment. Furthermore, it only took about 3 days of being on the mailing list to learn about his work and take advantage of it. To suggest that you've never heard of him makes it quite clear that you've never spent so much as a few days reading the freebsd-java list, much less researched it intensively. Which naturally leads to the question: What do you make of an organization choosing to take responbility for bringing Java to FreeBSD, that hasn't bothered to spend any time in. . . freebsd-java? And what do you make of an organization that lives inside a gift economy, but isn't interested in participating in it? The answers probably aren't complimentary, and I urge the FreeBSD Foundation to do what it can to repair that oversight (probably too late, from both directions), and work in the future to becoming more aware of the environment it's working in. -j Joshua IV -=- -=- =-= -=- -=: :-= /-\ Floundering Cognitive Ass of the Cognitive Assonance Cabal To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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