Re: The Trolling on the freebsd- lists

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

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 03:20:05PM -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 3:57 AM -0800 1/6/04, Bill Huey (hui) wrote:
> >I keep wanting to exit this thread, but I feel this needs to
> >be said repeatedly somehow.
> 
> I think the phrase you're looking for is "personal vendetta".
> Certainly that is how it comes across.

That's inaccurate. I think you need a bit of context regarding my
situation.

> The past is the past.  Get over it.  <insert Eagles song>

Yes and no, the situation I was in, specifically with the FreeBSD
Foundation, is pretty extreme. I think it's safe to say that without
my work in the FreeBSD Java project, particularly with the HotSpot JIT,
that no modern Sun JDK 1.3-4 would exist under the any of the BSDs.
Clearly, this is a major project with broad impact and huge implications
when completed. Without it, Java would be 3-4 years behind the times.
This is very esoteric work, requires a very high level of skill in a
pretty obscure unification of domains (compilers front/back, OS layer
threading systems, language runtimes, ...) done purely as a volunteer
project on my end. Somebody needs to make sense of one of the most
complicate JIT compilers on this planet. That's me.

Clearly, I was a key, if not the key technical person, putting much of
the critical effort into the project if you read the CVS logs. Yet in
the context of a volunteer group, where money is funneled through a
some kind of non-profit foundation, you have to have competency at
integrating this with other volunteers in the group without pissing
people off by taking status/credit for work that other developers have
done. In this case, these action where indirected at me, without them
really understanding or being conscious of the situation.

You don't pay another volunteer in a group without doing the proper
group research about who does what developement/political work and it
should have been discussed with all core members, both technical and
political. In this case, I found out about these actions second hand
on the mailing list without them directly discussing it with me. I was
kind of wondering what the hell happened, held back and angry response,
asked the FreeBSD Foundation what the hell was going on with that, and
determined this person is a complete asshole when he "didn't like my
attitude" verses dealing with circumstances professionally. The attitude
is irrelevant (not really that bad until the shit hit the fan), a
foundation such as that must have competent developer relations like
any development group and deal with problems like this. A group must
address severe greivances in a professional manner, which is this wasn't
the case.

The actions of the FreeBSD Foundation effectively took political control
over the project through their method of funding, which was never "solely"
their's in the first place. It needs to be addressed as group effort and
their actions pissed off a critical developer in the process of their
incompetency. Clearly, this is a very bad action. When developers do
projects like this for recognition and status, these actions are a very
negative detractor for getting new and or keeping old developers. So I
flamed them to bits publically. Which generate a lot of responses.

It's like being fully exploited/used and dumped. Clearly, this is not
a precedence you want to be setting in a new development group. You don't
treat your main technical lead, that's also a critical liason to Sun
Microsystems, and yes, a former BSDi-BSD/OS engineer in this manner. And
yes, I use to work for them as a high level engineer. These kind of actions
are the most negative any group can take to sabtotage any kind of genuinely
positive spirit of open source development, GPL or BSD.

Pissing on a former BSDi engineer, (and if you remember, the folks that gave
the SMPng locking primitives to the FreeBSD project and the creators of
Berkeley Unix) a key liason to Sun Microsystems Java group and a critical
technical engineer for Java development under pretty much all of the BSDs,
is pretty amazingly boneheaded on their part. Yes, this travesty is effects
all Java development for all of the BSDs. The FreeBSD Java project is an
umbrella project for all BSD Java development.

So the response you have, which would normally apply to the typical
developer under normal circumstances, doesn't really address the potential
competency problem I might have doing development in a new group. It's
a legitmate concern or else I'm wasting my time.

> If you want to contribute to the future, then write up some
> cool code for DragonFly, things that will make all FreeBSD
> users green with envy (and all OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux
> users).  When it comes to *proving* how cool you are in the
> open-source world, you do it with working code, and not with
> constant personal attacks over what has happened in the past.

If this case was that simple, I'd have done this by now, but this little
known story in the BSDs makes that above suggestion a inappropriately
mild in this situation. It's really about whether I trust a development
group to do the right thing in this context or not, and therefore
start developing for a particular group. This is a very legitmate
concern.

ok, out of here. :)

bill