On 18 Jan 2001, at 6:26, Terry Lambert wrote:

> NB:	Actually, I'm proud of doing that: if it had been
> 	successful, we'd probably have an organization that
> 	would be much more helpful to people with problems,
> 	and much less likely to say things like "you want it
> 	fixed, where's the code, you whiney moron?".

Yes, that's a rather unfortunate side of FreeBSD which I'd rather see the 
back of.

>            I'm
> 	not that happy with the clique-ish nature of the
> 	community that's developed, where everyone thinks
> 	it's the order of the universe that "newbies must
> 	pay their dues".

I've not yet considered it clique-ish, but now that you mention it, I've had 
more than one encounter with a committer who felt it was beneath them 
to deal with an issue I brought up.  In brief, they said they had better 
things to do.  I've always been a advocate of helping when and where 
you can.  The level at which one can help changes as experience is 
gained.  It's a moving threshold.

>            The BSD community has grown to
> 	resemble a college fraternity, with its own set of
> 	"hazing" rules, which, thankfully, Linux and other
> 	Open Source software projects seem to have sucessfully
> 	avoided.

Could you please elaborate on the "hazing" rules?

> I think the reason the "openports" thing hasn't really
> gotten anywhere yet in displacing the ports trees of the
> various projects, is that there is not demonstrable benefit
> for the majority of the people doing the actualy work: 

Do you mean openpackages.org?  That project is still fairly 
new.  We're not even at the stage of having a ports tree ready
for public consumption.

--
Dan Langille
The FreeBSD Diary - http://freebsddiary.org/
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