On 04/19/2012 11:05 AM, Bob Hoffman wrote:
I think his post about the internet was a tongue in cheek quote about how rough and realistic responses can be on the net.
Thats what I thought, but wanted to remove ambiguity.
We have some super cool people in and around the project, I just feel we lose out not having them more involved. And being a better more positive community is definitely more fun being a part of.
Look at it from this side : there are two kinds of people who come along looking for help ( perhaps asking the wrong questions, or fixing the wrong problem ). (1) People who have a choice and (2) People who dont have a choice.
for (1), we can chose, as a group to set fairly high bars, create barriers of entry that require people to 'get the plot', or 'rtfm like its for their life' or 'burn the rubber etc' And they then have the choice to make : either see the value of doing this and jump over the fence from an 'others' to 'one of ours' side of the garden. Or they can move along and rebase over to something else. These people are also people who dont lose, since they have the option and the opportunity to find something else that better ticks their problem box.
On the other hand the people in group (2) are the ones who get hurt when we set barriers really high and create an inhospitable environment; they are the guys and girls who either inherited a CentOS install, or are doing something not-by-their-own-personal choice. Be it for work, for development, for a fun project - whatever. When we set high barriers and create a hostile firewall for them to jump through to cross over: they are the ones getting isolated, making bad choices, getting into situations wherein their CentOS experience is not only sub-optimal but also harmful in cases.
Both of these user groups are important in their own way. A lot of the widespread traction CentOS has in the verticals ( hosting, cloud, voip, hpc, appliances, smb etc ) is down to the people from (1) who came + stayed and built resources and tooling around and in the CentOS ecosystem. the (2)'s have been the traction base.
</just my 2 bits>