Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 12:29:13 -0800 From: Bill Huey (Hui) <billh@gnuppy.monkey.org> To: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> Cc: "John L. Utz III" <john@utzweb.net>, Brent Verner <brent@rcfile.org>, freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, rwatson@freesbsd.org, calvin.austin@sun.com, brian@collab.net, bod@freebsdfoundation.org, "Bill Huey (Hui)" <billh@gnuppy.monkey.org> Subject: Re: patchset 2 report (billh's resignation) Message-ID: <20030206202913.GA2285@gnuppy.monkey.org> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.20030206104124.jdp@polstra.com> References: <863cn2nf6g.wl@utweb.net> <XFMail.20030206104124.jdp@polstra.com>
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On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 10:41:24AM -0800, John Polstra wrote: > Bill's public attack on me stems from those e-mails. They contain > the history of this issue. In transforming a simple, everyday > hiring decision into a public attack on the FreeBSD Foundation and > on me personally, Bill threw the rules of etiquette out the window. BS, you have a responsibility to the greater FreeBSD community to make sure and that input is listened to and then acted upon appropriately. You failed when you did this behind everybody's back, not just me. You failed the entire group. > If Bill wants this to be public then it is _all_ going to be public. > Some will disagree with this, but I can live with that. The e-mails > will stay on the web page until I no longer feel the need to defend > my actions in public. You need to as a non-profit for the sake of the community, that's completely arrogant to think otherwise. > One person criticized the title I put on the web page. His point is > well taken. The whole day yesterday was so utterly surreal that I > guess I needed a small dose of comic relief. That was inappropriate, + ridicule and belittlement all of which reflect badly in a corporate context when getting grant money. It makes you and the rest of FreeBSD look stupid. You should be fired from the position and people need to be elected into roles that significant to the community. > and I have changed the title to "Mail". > kinds, etc., those rules have nothing to do with 501(c)(3) Non-profits like the Red Cross exist to serve a larger group folks, not you and your warped sense of ego in relation to the rest of the FreeBSD community. The fact that you don't understand this means, that you're missing something in your personal experience essential for the competent function of this job you've been self appointed to. > Greg and Nate agreed that Alexey would be a good person for the job. I would have agreed that Alexey is a good person for the job, but there should have never been a place and time where I should have been excluded from the decision making body, since I've classically had that role ever since I came from the BSD/OS group at WindRiver. > (This turned out to be a valuable recommendation, and we couldn't be > more pleased with his work.) We initiated discussions with Alexey, Yes, stroke yourself more. It's disgusting. > worked out the contractual details, etc., and he went to work on it Behind everybodies back with regard to any preexisting political structure in existence or otherwise, very stupid. > full time. Since then he has made great progress, and he has kept > us up-to-date with status reports. How do you know what the progress is ? have you seen the commit logs ? In fact, you don't know who's been doing what in the group, which is why you asked both Nate and Greg in the first place. That's crack smoking claim on your part.. You would even be making progress with any develope if I hadn't taken on this task from Dec 2001 to May 2002, all on my own time and money, just to see this through. > That was the state of things at the beginning of this week. Now let > me make something perfectly clear. When we asked for recommendations, > Bill Huey's name never came up. He wasn't mentioned. As far as I I never came up since Nate is partially held a senseless grudge from a private conversation that I dismissed as silly and never looked back thinking things where ok, he'll chill out and realize this was stupid. In partial summary, you were partially manipulated into not even considering me in the first place because of prior resentments and the non-mention of me in the first place... Regardless, given the core role I have in the group, I should have never been excluded from the discussion from hiring Alexey or anybody else. > know, I had never even heard his name before -- certainly not in any You never heard my name before ? Good god, do you know what I've done ? or even understand it ? > context that would cause me to remember it. It never came to you since your group didn't competently research what folks where doing in this group and didn't ask any formal body about what was really going on. That's another sign of incompetence. > Then, out of the blue, we received his first e-mail on Tuesday. It > was absolutely baffling to all of us at the Foundation. Here was > this profanity-laden flame from a perfect stranger, demanding an > explanation for the fact that we hadn't hired him! Not true, you have a reading comprehension problem. I asked why I wasn't included in the decision making body. Now that's clear, you didn't think to ask if the folks you asked for advice in the first place what other engineers would think about this. > The rest of the history is documented in the e-mails, which most of > you have already seen. To re-iterate: msg01.txt was the first I had > ever heard of Bill Huey. How would you feel in my position? > Frankly, my first reaction was, "Thank GOD we didn't hire that guy!" That's because you're a narrow minded dickhead that doesn't listen to anybody reasonable. > Some of you have criticized the terseness of my replies to Bill. I Terse = rude, dismissive, reactive, selfish, unanalytical and unsuitable for sitting on a $50,000 grant from Sun so that the license came be done through the FreeBSD Foundation, which I support since both Greg and Nate supported over Blackdown, Calvin Austin's suggestion. If we had just turned this into a Blackdown project this would have never happened in the first place. You were given political power in the community, in terms of several grant, one from Sun implicitly and more for Alexey, and then didn't act on it responsibly as a non-profit to the corporation nor to the developer or user body that you supposeably represent. > hope this context will help you to understand it a little better. > My very first contact with the fellow came in the form of a flame > from him. This was followed 18 hours later by a second mail which > contained an explicit threat. I don't think anybody knows for sure I think it's understandable when you didn't reply to it and "dismissed" it the first time around. It's partially your responsibility to interface and possibly deal with semi-irrate corporate body any constituents. > how to deal with a person who's in that state of mind. It seemed to > me that the least harmful approach would be to avoid escalating the > situation. So I sent him the briefest, most emotion-free reply I Most emotion free ? You've got to be kidding me, you were a condescending ass in that second email, which is why I got really fucking pissed. > could manage, and in the subsequent mail I tried to keep things > strictly on a professional level. We could talk all day long about Professional like competent communication between all relevant parties ? > whether that was the right approach or not. I did my best, and I am > proud of the fact that I didn't let Bill drag me down to his level > of discourse. You brought to new level when you title that exchange as "Bill's Job Interview", that's pretty stupid of you. > On to a related topic ... Some people, Bill included, took offense at > my statement, "Bill, there are easily a hundred people who could have > done this work, but we could only hire one of them." This was in no A number of folks did. > way intended to be disparaging toward any Java developer; nor was it > meant as any kind of insult. I am sorry that some people took it that > way, and I'll try to learn how to express myself better in the future. > The point I was trying to make was simply that if we hired one person, > there were going to be a whole bunch of other qualified people that we > _didn't_ hire. Bill was one of those. For whatever reason, he's > the only one who took it as a personal affront. Because I did all the freaking work. Pick a paper an read: http://research.sun.com/self/papers/papers.html This is what I have to deal with including a backward way of introducing myself to the intricacies of Solaris threading in one of the density C/C++/assembler trees most folks have ever seen. Believe it or not that's 1/3rd of the HotSpot compiler and not the entire thing. The JVM is used as supporting first class type system as an add on to HotSpot. It's simply complete insanity. > I actually am fairly confident that there are a hundred people in > the world who could do the job. I mean -- come on, people! In the > whole world? Of course there are! But honestly, the number doesn't > matter for the point I was trying to make unless you think the > number is 1 -- in which case you'll get nothing but a hearty belly > laugh from me. Bogus argument. It was implied that you though some job blow high school drop out could have done this job, which just isn't true. > I have just one other thing I'd like to say as I end this lengthy > e-mail. We at the FreeBSD Foundation are volunteers who are simply "We at the FreeBSD Foundation are incompetent voluteers, that should have had these roles be elected in office in first place so that we can actual serve the community at large instead of bloating our already overinflated egos." > trying to do something for the benefit of the FreeBSD Project. We > don't get paid. In fact, we donate money as well as time to the > Foundation. It is a rewarding job, at times, but frankly it isn't > much fun. The Internet is a big place, and there is always somebody > out there who can manage to view just about anything as a > conspiracy. There is really nothing I can do about such people. I Because it partially was. You didn't pick up on it nor demonstrated sensitivity to the situation. > just try to keep my cool and do my best, knowing full well that I > can't please everybody. > > Well, that's about it. I think I have said just about everything I > can say on this topic. I am most likely not going to write any more > about it. I just don't see the point of writing if there's nothing > new to say. As I said at the very beginning: draw your own > conclusions. Conclusions: 1) FreeBSD Foundation doesn't listen to people. 2) FF doesn't understand how putting money into a volunteer situation can possibly cause confusion in relation to other developers. Who fairly decides "what" goes to which person ? 3) John Polstra is a wuss that can't handle a little bit of confrontation so that another core developer understands why he was omitted from the political process in which should have never been omitted in the first place. 4) FF positions should be elected and have competent people interfacing with all corporate, developers and user communities. bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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