Again, I am dismayed.

I personally come down on the side of monolithic rc, but that's not what is
bothering me now.

der Mouse and Greywolf have now repeated their main complaint *3* times.
There has been no response that I can see.

The main complaint is that amid diverse and strongly held opinions, the
project decided that they were going to shove one of them down everyone
else's throat.

It has been generally agreed that this is *rude*. (I don't believe that this
is considered rude in the commercial os industry because we expect it, but
open source is something else altogether and the violation of the
expectation that we are a valued part of a community is what is rude. IMHO.)

But the only reply is "It's a step in the right direction!" and "You don't
need to know what is going on!" and in response to what I feel are
legitemate questioning of technical details, "That's just not true."

There have been some emails that contain intelligent disscussion of
technical pros and cons, but they are becoming more and more rare. 

Why is this happening? Why is there a general refusal on the part of the
project to say "Ok, we rammed this down your throats, sorry." It's not that
big of a thing to admit. You can even omit the "sorry" part, so long as you
admit it!

As for short responses, maybe if you're up really late, it would be better
to respond to them in the morning when you aren't fuzzy. (This is a wild
assumption on my part. I know that when I'm up really early/late in the
morning, I get fuzzy and can't think well, so I'm applying this idea to
everyone else. If it doesn't apply, disregard the comment.)

I do want to restate that I appreciate the time and effort put into
maintaining the project. I simply think that dictation of os to the user
base is rude, and counterproductive thing to do. 

I've survived on Win 3.1 for many years now, and I'm certainly not going to
upgrade that half of my computer to anything more evil anytime soon. If
NetBSD continues this trend of shoving things in people's faces, I will
continue to run 1.4.1 and not ever upgrade, though it will cost me the use
of Staroffice, with which I had hoped to sever myself from the evil
Microsoft influence forever. I'm sorry to say this. But I hope that people
will *listen* to the message:
	 You are going to lose user base if you continue in this fashion.
And the user base you lose, will be the future developers. 

Give us a sign that someone is *listening*.


Appologies if this was more a flame than I intended,

Carrie Jones






[ On Thursday, March 16, 2000 at 20:43:42 (-0500), der Mouse wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: rc.d
>
> The price that it exacts is that it is now significantly harder to do
> anything outside of the "what the vendor provides" box.  

That's just plain not true.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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