[CentOS] A request from the CentOS Project

[Karanbir Singh]

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>

-- 
Karanbir Singh
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