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A day in the life of the CentOS team

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 25, 2006 20:26 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: A day in the life of the CentOS team by hpp
Parent article: A day in the life of the CentOS team

Actually I think the arrogance on the Linux side is showing up in all the postings of this email exchange. I remember similar things on the old Amiga BBS's, OS/2, NextOS, BeOS, and various Unix's that no longer exist in any large marketspace (IRIX, Ultrix, etc). The community line would become a mantra of "It means that the clueless will go off to our inferior competitors and in the long term they cannot compete and suffer."

There is a reason that so many Greek tragedies are about hubris and what follies it occurs. We would be better spent learning from history than repeating it.


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A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 25, 2006 21:08 UTC (Sat) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

I really don't see how he could have been any more accommodating. Companies won't put up with that garbage with paying customers. Why should he when they aren't even paying him? The level of arrogance, aggressiveness, and paranoia were at a level which made conversation impossible.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 25, 2006 22:17 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

The level of arrogance I am refering to is the people who decide to make a lark about someone with 22 years IT etc. Sure the fellow comes across as an insufferable goat. I dont see where we get to throw the first stone so to speak.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 0:29 UTC (Sun) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link]

> I dont see where we get to throw the first stone so to speak.

The city manager threw the first stone by threatening legal action and making baseless accusations. No matter how many times or how many way the CentOS dev tried to explain it he only got more and more threatening. He also made the terminal error of claiming technical compentency while making those threats. The CentOS people displayed far more patience than I would have. As the earlier poster pointed out, a commercial operation wouldn't put up with it either.

I would have explained it once then warned him about legal action myself. Bad publicity is the least of what this clown deserves. If I were a taxpayer in that town, I'd be seriously worried about the quality of help my tax dollars were buying.

22 long years

Posted Mar 27, 2006 0:45 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

In his resume the guy claims to have been a Program Manager for 22 years at Raytheon. Can you imagine what levels of psychological torture his staff (for whatever programs he managed) must have endured? Oh well, this is just a small vengeance for all those tortured geeks.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 28, 2006 17:09 UTC (Tue) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link]

The level of arrogance I am refering to is the people who decide to make a lark about someone with 22 years IT etc

22 years proves not much, isn't it ? You'd thought that by that time one could identify such a problem quite easily, or at least have enough clue to know where to look for apart from calling the FBI.

Being a monk for 50 years does not necessarily make one a saint.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 25, 2006 22:48 UTC (Sat) by hpp (subscriber, #4756) [Link]

Mind you, the arrogance of my previous post was not from a Linux viewpoint: it was from an IT department viewpoint (and this is at a Fortune 50 company). We find Open Source to be a competitive advantage, and if our competitors don't see it that way, the marketplace will decide who's right. When we benchamrk ouselves against our competitors, we get more done with less money, fewer people and with a higher uptime. As a result, we also get paid better :-)

Incidentally, that also means we feel free to abandon Open SOurce if a superior alternative comes along. Haven't seen that so far - in fact, when a commercial product gets inflicted on us (*cough* Exchange *cough*) it proves to be a royal pain in the behind.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 12:02 UTC (Sun) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

when a commercial product gets inflicted on us

Most open source products are commercial too, at least if you ask Red Hat, Novell or IBM.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 14:06 UTC (Sun) by hpp (subscriber, #4756) [Link]

> Most open source products are commercial too, at least if you ask
> Red Hat, Novell or IBM.

True in the sense that you pay for commercial support. False in the sense that source code is available, we can make local patches, and we can bypass the vendor and do our own development.

One the key costs of commercial products in a large enterprise is integration: making it work with everything else that is out there. Having source code and the ability to make changes implies you can run the product in a different manner than the vendor intended; that you can analyze scalability problems yourself, and that the vendor cannot get away with false answers as to what causes any problems. Open Source saves time and money.

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 19:17 UTC (Sun) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

Sorry, I don't understand much of your comment. Do you consider open source businesses non-commercial? In what way?

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 26, 2006 20:54 UTC (Sun) by hpp (subscriber, #4756) [Link]

I am trying to make a distinction between:
  • Old-style commercial: closed source, single vendor, support from one vendor, don't tinker
  • Open source: multiple vendors, support from multiple sources (optionally a vendor, generally on-line, also in-house), freedom to tinker and adapt
I should have said "commercial closed source" vs "open source".

Ah, so you mean...

Posted Mar 27, 2006 3:08 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

You would have been understood immediately if you used the more explicit terms Free vs. Proprietary:

  • Proprietary: closed source, single vendor, support from one vendor, don't tinker
  • Free: multiple vendors, support from multiple sources (optionally a vendor, generally on-line, also in-house), freedom to tinker and adapt

I think we don't need "Open Source" any more.

Ah, so you mean...

Posted Mar 27, 2006 14:42 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

Actually, for proprietary, I'd leave out "closed source" and "don't tinker".

And being even more pedantic, "proprietary" comes from "property", meaning "owned" - and that INCLUDES LINUX! Okay, we don't use that word that way any more, but we can thank the marketing slogan "Unix is Proprietary, Windows is Open" for that ...

Cheers,
Wol

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 27, 2006 6:41 UTC (Mon) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

What has commercial to do with it? Where does noncommercial closed source fit in ("freeware")?

Why didn't you simply write closed source / open source, or nonfree ("proprietary") / free?

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 30, 2006 14:41 UTC (Thu) by Alban (guest, #5500) [Link]

Ermm. Shouldn't that be Geek tragedies (:-}}
(Sorry I could not resist )

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