[CentOS-devel] wallpapers
R P Herrold
herrold at owlriver.com
Wed Jan 5 03:33:49 UTC 2011
On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 14:48, Travis Heinstrom
> <theinstrom at hollisinteractive.com> wrote:
>> One would think that Red Hat would monitor a mailing list such as this.
>
> But what would "it" say? Ever since Red Hat Linux it has been that the
> various "logos" packages have been non-free and everything in them
> needed to be changed. And after the EL-3 fiasco, CentOS has usually
> made sure that the logos were completely changed so as not to deal
> with lawyers and their demonic brethren (no offence intended Russ :)).
>
> speaking as myself (who helped on this for EL-5), not as a Red Hat employee.
Hi, Stephen
No offense ever taken as to lawyer jokes -- The best lawyers
are loved those who are their client, and feared by the other
side. If one wants (needs) love from all, one does not seek
it through practicing law
The fun of CentOS (and of Linux with the Red Hat
'testers-list' and Free and Open Source generally) was in
solving really hard technical challenges. I have answered all
these questions over and over, publicly and privately, and
no-one reads them, or thinks about the answers, or is willing
to try to follow the paths that I, and others, and you with
your work in mark elidement, have conducted in the open
I've see no community interest in filing the needed bugs of
identifying and classifying what needs to be changed.
Because of that, perhaps ten days ago, I sat down to build the
tool to address letting a person have a SSO registration,
email confirm ping, self-service password resend and reset, [a
long time CentOS need -- this part up and running fine in my
testing ]. Still do roll in were code to explode artwork,
strip ImageMagick 'identify' information, display a
automatically created altered (similar to the Postal Service's
former requirements on reproducing its stamp art in catalogs)
version of that image, and to have a commmunity ability to
simply look at pictures, add minimal comments, and triage
items of question in a form leaving a durable trail.
Perhaps, I thought, that bar would be low enough to get
participation --- Typical geek approach, seeking a techincal
approach to a culture problem ;( We've tried this over and
over again how many times and end back in the sewer -- the IRC
channel held promise at first, but the whiners, OT,and
'spoon-feed me' masses won out as some in the project
leadership loosened the will to stay on topic, and the channel
was lost
I started at 9 on that tool, and had the SSO proof of concept
working by 1300 -- then I left the office to spend time with a
couple visiting grandkids to a local firehouse. Long story
short, I mis-estimated my ability to control the speed of
descent of my mass down their firepole, and seriously damaged
an ankle. I have just recovered enough to scan through ML
traffic and cherrypick what to reply on. I'll get back to the
tool, but life has to take precedence here for me for a while
More exciting to me, one new person has stepped up and
actually set up a new approach autobuilder, communicating with
me, and is making what I can only call great progress
But will or would that person's 'fruit' be CentOS? I just
don't know, but as all CentOS 'community' 'at large' seems to
contain are complainers, and people who carp that the free
meal CentOS serves does not please their pallete, and yet do
not leave. And people who know better who won't hold to
leading an effort to 'shun and rebuke' such behaviour
One thing the enforced idle time has done is caused me to
think that perhaps it is I that is wrong, and that I err in an
expectation of a community publishing their failures and
successes, and learning by doing the homework, and setting up
the exercise labs, and not just reading and nodding their head
thinking:
I could do that
but rather:
I did this, and these are my specifics still
outstanding
I sent specific and detailed instructions to a regular whiner
here, on the EPEL list and in the Red Hat tracker with his
solutions, and never even received an acknowledgement, let
alone a thanks -- the mail delivery log is quite explicit that
my advice was accepted by that person's mailserver ...
The current thread this is on is thoughtless personified (as
in: posted without thinking through the implications of an
issue, and its discussion in certain venue). Add that to the
disrespectful, un-trimmed, off topic and endless social rants
in main ML, and now here, I am really soured on the
[in]ability of the CentOS project to address 'poisonous
people'. Perhaps the poster is hoping Red Hat will issue some
'bright line legal guidance' for free
This is bone-headed on so many levels it hurts to go through
them. All facts turn on cases; Troy (who has a dog in this
hunt, sort of) offered one analysis --- BUT IT IS THE ADVICE
OF THE LAWYER YOU HAVE PAID that comes with a warranty behind
it, and NO OTHER. And when I wrote such opinion letters, we
would spend weeks getting the question and scope for a
specific fact pattern narrowed down enough to even be
answerable. Red Hat would be a fool it if expansively locked
itself into a position here saying what is hoped to be heard;
would say nothing if it appeared and said: go see your own
lawyer, yet again; and would damage itself in the eyes of
those whom it seeks to convert into paying customers, to make
threats
I am under most serious medical instructions as to remaining
prone, elevating the limb, and so forth for the next several
weeks, at a minimum
Good luck, folks, and those few of whom I consider to be my
friends here. You know who you are.
-- Russ herrold
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