28 Jul
2009
28 Jul
'09
9:56 p.m.
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:36 PM, <laseray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[ ... the usual stuff ... ]
You are not required to look up to anyone. Nobody has control over
you. Nobody expects you to be silent about matters of importance.
However, some basic civility and an awareness of how your behaviour
makes the community represented by this mailing list appear would be
appreciated. By me and by others here who have remained silent on the
mailing list but not elsewhere.
Dave would be the first (well, ok, second) to admit that he's not
always the most polite developer on this list. But even his most
impolite outbursts are a league above what you've demonstrated in
these exchanges, particularly your recent reply to him, let alone your
private email to Fons.
Your goal of GPL compliance is a noble one, and entirely correct. But
... your tactics have become are really offensive to more and more of
us, and to claim that you take inspiration from Stallman, the FSF or
groups like the SFLC is worse still. Stallman is a master at a certain
kind of humor, and he uses sardonic wit and sharp analogy to leverage
his position infinitely more often than he resorts to childish put
downs ... "you are a mental midget" is grade school material and
serves to discredit this community in many different ways. Both the
FSF and SFLC have spokespeople who are careful and guarded with their
words in ways that you seem to have difficulty with.
It is clearly a good thing that a program that was in utter violation
of the GPL is now very much closer to being in compliance, with a
reasonable chance of being fully compliant in the not too distant
future. I think that you deserve a certain amount of credit for this.
But your communication skills as demonstrated on this mailing list,
and in the emails with Robert Keller that you posted, mark you in ways
that I suspect you don't want to be marked. I can say with certainty
that there are several developers on this list who would refuse to
work with you on projects because of your behaviour here. You probably
believe that you can live with that, given the nobility of your cause
and some community of other people that you think might help you with
whatever work you want to accomplish with Impro-Visor. I certainly
hope that is true, because it looks like an interesting and
potentially powerful program. Unfortunately, your communication style
has likely poisoned a good part of the potential community of interest
in ways that make its development less likely to evolve more rapidly
as a result of its (eventual) compliance with the GPL. You are
responsible for that, nobody else. Whether you like it or not, or
believe us all to be mental midgets or some other put down that you
dredge up in a further response, your emails over the last 36 hours
make it far more likely that Keller and his group, not you, will get
whatever cooperation might be forthcoming from other people here. And
you are responsible for that too. Sleep well.