When I was a child I had a dog. Well it wasn't really a dog, it was a
Hamster, but it was furry like a dog and I called it Fido and taught it
to fetch. Well not fetch really, more like poop on command, all you had
to do was hold it in your hand. Semantics notwithstanding I really
loved this dog, and we would eat dinner at the table together. He would
eat carrots, but I wouldn't because I didn't like carrots. My dad said
I wasn't responsible enough to have a dog but Fido disagreed with him,
and that made my dad mad. So he took my dog away from me.
Later, he gave it back, but he just wasn't the same. He wouldn't fetch
anymore. Well he never really could but now he really didn't. I mean
he was just a hamster so I suppose I should not have been so very very
very mad at him; shouldn't have taken it out on him. Poor little
hamster. Later on I wrote an open source project and called it Fido and
was really proud of it. But it was open source and it was my project
and there was a lot of arguing and it made me sad.
IMNSHO what made me so sad was having to read through similarly
nonsensical childish emails from Jonny Blowhard, who is not user of this
software project and does not have a relevant question about how to use
it. And what makes me and Fido really mad is that we ARE using this
software in production, and have always found the community very
responsive, and this project is exactly what I needed, and absolutely
nothing more.
I really don't care about ancient history, or credit, or discussions of
ethics. Go write a blog or something. Maybe you can talk about Niggle
and create an animated logo for it or something, maybe link to a couple
pictures of Jessica Alba. But please don't then come here and argue
about how your blog is better than everybody else's.
Thanks,
Me, and Fido the Hamster-Dog
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Tim Colson (tcolson) wrote:
Jonathan wrote:
"What cannot IMO be tolerated is dishonesty, that people just go around
saying stuff that is not true (!)"
Some excerpts from a thread in 2002:
"I want to get off this list now. Don't fan the flames."
"This is my last message, I'm sending the unsubscribe message right
now along with this one. Good bye everybody. Jonathan"
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/jakarta-velocity-user/200205.mb
ox/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar."
Mark Twain
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marktwain141698.html
Tim,
I see you've been digging digging digging for something to sink your
teeth into. Had to go back 3 years, but you got something...
On a bit of a tangent, isn't there some approximate statute of
limitations on pecadillos? I mean, if you're going to start screaming
about my bad behavior and coming up with examples, shouldn't you come
up with something that happened in the last... I dunno.... 3 to 6
months or something...? The guy who wants everybody to kill-file me,
that's surely on the basis of stuff I've written in the last few weeks
or so, isn't it?
But anyway, my statement you quote was truthful. When I said I was
unsubscribing back then 3 years ago, I most definitely did unsubscribe.
The context was that I was furious. The lead developer of Velocity of
the time, one Geir Magnusson, publicly insinuated on this list that I
was falsely taking credit for authorship of work of which I am indeed
the author -- the Niggle framework.
There was clear intent to insinuate something and I got very very very
angry. I suspect that you do not fully understand the seriousness of
that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am not aware of your ever having
written a piece of open source software of that scale (or possibly any
scale at all) -- and certainly not, of your doing so and then having
somebody suggest on a public forum that you were falsely taking credit
for that work.
I was thoroughly disgusted and had no intention at that moment of ever
participating further on this forum. I was being completely honest
about my intentions and followed through on that.
Okay, I changed my mind later, though actually, to be technical about
it, I never resubscribed. I access the list via the NNTP interface
provided by gmane.org. But that IMO is irrelevant. This is a public,
open forum and I can participate if I want. Similarly, I could
announce to the world that I was going to quit smoking and then, since
I'm human and subject to temptation, be unable to quit or quit and
then start again. That is not the kind of dishonesty I am talking
about. Nobody reasonable would call someone a liar on such grounds.
The person who states that he is quitting smoking for good, in his own
mind is being honest -- that the statement later turns out to be
untrue does not make somebody a liar per se.
No, when I brought up the issue of honesty, I was specifically talking
about something absolutely separate: misrepresenting the state of a
software project, representing that it is being actively maintained
and developed and always has been -- when this is not the case.
It is unethical professionally. People evaluating open source software
have the right to know the state of these projects. Do you think it
would be okay for me write a bunch of code this weekend, stick it on
sourceforge/freshmeat and label it production/stable -- the FooBar
library Version 6.02...
This is the kind of thing we're talking about here.
Jonathan Revusky
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