Re: The Trolling on the freebsd- lists

[Bill Huey (hui) <billh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 08:42:04PM -0500, Dan Melomedman wrote:
> Bill Huey wrote:
> > Some of it is a personal reaction against the FreeBSD community itself.
> > It's really their problem to clean up since they mistreat people regularly.
> > Nothing you or anybody else outside of that community can really do to
> > correct the situation.
> 
> Just like anywhere else in life.
> 
> Like in any other techie community, ego is always on display. My vi is
> still better than your emacs (and longer).

Yeah, part of the problem that I see is psychology behind the use of CVS
itself and a personal notion of territory and group bureaucracy around it.
The Linux community uses BK which has no notion of a central repository.
You cannot wrap a group of folks, political body, around something that
isn't centralized and it can't be politically controlled or manipulated in
a destructive manner because of it. Combine that and Linus's generally
positive attitude of "inclusion through neutrality" verses something like
"exclusion through conformance", and you have a group that can merge in as
much new work as it can produce while preserving that notion of inclusion.
This is a bit over idealistic in description, but IMO, this is largely
right.

It's probably the main reason why the Linux community can go through many
more serious technical revisions than the BSDs, attracting new developers,
etc... Matt has been a pretty good mediator so far, which is why I'm so
positive about this community.

I see a lot of the problem with FreeBSD strictly as a function of education,
specifically the lack of ability to understand significant technology and
political changes in current times. As projects like dfBSD and Linux get
more and more popular, it'll provide a means for other developers that are
unhappy with a community to migrate.

Back to work :)

bill