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