Sorry to see you go. You are right on one thing and that is no answer
should be express in that form.
And while we may disparaged on many things our goal should always be to
find a work around the problem.
El mié, 21-05-2014 a las 17:23 +0100, Tristan Santore escribió:
On 21/05/14 15:32, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>
> On 05/20/2014 06:39 PM, Onyeibo Oku wrote:
>> I still don't understand why people dump a summary of their grievances
>> on the ambassador list and walk away, then leave members -- who never
>> heard the a tiny-bit of their debates -- to wonder what went wrong.
>
> Usually by my observation all those years of ambassadors activity, the
> underlying cause of ambassador leaving the project is due to some
> internal ambassador power struggle relevant to their region. Who did
> do or did not not do what, who showed up for which events, who did
> not, why did he get swag while I did not so fourth and so on, general
> petty squabble like that.
>
> I for example have had no problem spreading the good word of Fedora
> all those years without having to do so with the assistant of swag and
> other promoting material.
>
> Only once have I requested and be given ambassadors swag stickers,
> cd's etc which I picked in BRNO when I happened to be there for an
> systemd hackfest and the reason I have not engage as much as I could
> with the ambassador community is that I have been busy building up and
> participating in QA as well as being responsible for and handling the
> most invasive change in the project history since it's inception, the
> init replacement but that does not mean I have not been observing
> what's happening there along with everything else in the community.
>
> One of the underlying reasons of my departure realization of the false
> image the project has been projecting to the outside world and to the
> individuals participating in it where amongst other things the project
> is said to be free while infact it is being systematically oppressed
> by it's sponsor Red Hat and communities contributed being discarded
> and or put to disadvantage if they aren't in the direction or the
> benefit of Red Hat.
>
> I can give you several historic reference to that oppression or simply
> others can chime in like Christoph but here you can see that
> oppression taking place in it's purest form [1] so things that I once
> thought where within my power to change are not and those things will
> never change and they are most certainly not changing with this
> alleged new direction taking place.
>
> I devoted 8+ years of my free time to the project and made sacrifices
> along the way more then most people would do for the project because I
> was under the illusion of what it stood for even after I got warned by
> good and valuable community contributors like the members of the
> Fedora unity, who they themselves had been bitten by the same
> mistakes. An history of the project that our benevolent dictators want
> to bury in the past so the can continue to exploit the community for
> their own gain.
>
> I can tell you dont spread the word or participate in Fedora
> participate participate in Arch or Korora or any other distro or
> project instead where your contribution are valued for what they since
> it's driven by individuals that actually understand what community
> means or if you cannot or will not represent fedora for with what it
> actually represents so people that come contribute to it do so knowing
> they are Red Hat's free labour workforce but if you are like me you
> would ignore that warning and blindly follow the Fedora path which is
> why people leave others wondering what went wrong because if they are
> like me they have to figure this out or reaching this conclusion
> themselves...
>
> JBG
>
> 1.
>
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-January/194925.html
> --
> ambassadors mailing list
> ambassadors(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/ambassadors
Dear All,
Normally I could not be bothered to even reply to this email, however,
after reading this email and some replies to the mailing list thread for
the devel list, namely on the topic of spins I feel compelled to do so.
Firstly, I do not work for Red Hat, and I also sometimes get upset about
constraints that we face within Fedora, but life is full of constraints,
so sometimes you just have to live with that, blaming Red Hat here is
not the way forward. Best is to find a way to get around those
constraints, like the European Fedora contributors did with Livna,
FreshRPMS and Dribble (now rpmfusion).
Regarding the SWAG issue, if you feel upset about not getting swag, then
I think your motives are all wrong anyway. Since when does it
necessitate to have SWAG to engage fellow FOSS people out in the world
and the general public. Far more important is to give them help and show
them where to get support. That is also another reason why some people
on the #fedora channel need to become more friendly and target audience
orientated. It stands to reason that a lot people being introduced to
FOSS using Fedora or Ubuntu are first timers, and they will require a
lot of help. So generally we should hold ourselves to higher standards.
Also, please keep in mind, the budget we have is not unlimited!!! And
Red Hat is paying for this! They not only pay for swag, the hosting
costs 1 million USD+, people need to look after Infra too. Also, Red Hat
, has been so kind in the past to sponsor people's hotel expenses so
they could attend conferences, which made a substantial difference,
especially to those who otherwise had no financial means to attend them.
And then of course Red hat buys a lot of FOSS efforts or non-foss
efforts, which bring great features to the FOSS effort, one example here
is KVM/Qemu.
With regards to the internal feuding in some ambassador regions, I think
I have been on record here, that people need to grow up and stop acting
like little Children. It is not about your ego, it is about the people
out there. If you think it is about helping your ego along, then you are
participating in the wrong project.
Also, you cannot force volunteers to do anything! They are volunteering
and have jobs and University courses/school to take care off first.
Stuff that feeds them and houses them and clothes them, Fedora MUST be
secondary/tertiary to that effort.
With regards to the Spins issue, which seems to be Johanns main
grievance here, what is wrong with allowing people to make their own
remixes, basically making their own spins ? Which is what I gathered
from the mailing list bits I read. We used to do that all the time, and
to be honest, although I have not tried lately, it used to be very easy
once upon a time, and now I have no idea where to even start any more.
How does that make for a better experience for Fedora, if I have to get
a spin, because I cannot find the right information on how to make my
own one. Is one of our core mottos not freedom ? So, if I have to go and
download a spin to get what I want, instead of being able to make my
own, how does this aide freedom ?
Maybe we just need to create for groups or sub-groups in yum ? To allow
people to install those sub-groups ?
(Just an idea!)
I am not saying here, all spins should go, in particular a security
spin,electronics spin and updated live spin, would find a lot of
valuable uses in Universities, Colleges, Schools and some industry
sectors (there are going to be a few more here, which do not come to
mind, so apologies to those spin maintainers). However. how many spins
do you want to shove onto server space ? And then again, how many people
actually download spins at all ?
Now I shall address the "oppression" as you put it. First of all, Red
Hat is based in the US, which has patent laws, and as such must abide by
those laws or they could end up being fined huge amounts of money, just
look at the ridiculous Samsung versus Apple versus Google crap going on.
The only real winners here are lawyers. Customers do not benefit,
Industry does not benefit (software patents), competition does not
benefit, research and freedom to make anything you like how you like it,
does also not benefit. But there is nothing you can do about that, and I
am like many other people really annoyed and angry about this situation,
just look at some of my comments on the Legal list (sorry Richard and
Spot for having to put up with that, nothing personal just my
frustration when I have an outburst).
Further, we have always relied on some form of meritocracy, which is why
we all put up with very opinionated people like you and myself and many
others. People have opinions and because they do they write better
software or supply fixes or suggestions for improvements or just file
bugs, sometimes with a bit of a moan attached to that (which is not
meant as being offensive to package/code maintainers, just a sign of
temporary frustration that something is broken). So, I am putting your
suggestions that people no longer contribute to Fedora down to that, and
will excuse you for it, despite that being not only childish, but also
quite misdirected.
You will find other projects will have constraints too, and not only
that, other projects work together with everyone else in the FOSS
community, so it is all intertwined. In other words damaging one
project, inadvertently damages the rest.
With regards to Red Hat abusing the free labour work force, that is
quite frankly a joke and disingenuous of you and is also not fair.
Nobody forces anyone to do anything, unless you work for Red Hat. I have
never heard anyone saying to a contributor you must do this or that. Of
course there are rules for packaging etc.. but those are necessary to
prevent packages causing havoc. You will find those constraints in other
distributions too and other projects as a whole.
I just want to make one last point here, if you feel like you sacrificed
something for Fedora, then you probably misinterpreted free software
projects as a whole. You should have participated to enrich your and
other contributors lives, make better software, a better user
experience, have fun along the way, meet nice people at conferences, get
the satisfaction of helping others and being valued by them, because of
it, and various other benefits to yourself and others I cannot think of
at the moment.
Of course, if ones does not feel valued as a contributor, one should
speak up and talk to the board, other senior community people, who
should then accumulate grievances and put them forward to the board.
Which then could try and address those community issues.
I would now like to take the opportunity to thank you and, everyone else
in the community for all your efforts, but also state that from the
emails I saw from you Johann, that you were very outspoken and
opinionated, which generally can lead to those actors feeling they have
not been valued. However, I think sometimes we all have to take a step
back and seriously think about how people have treated us and what they
actually said, not what we thought they said. Because a lot of the
times, it was not as bad as we thought it really was or is.
In other words, we have to make ourselves more accountable and question
our behaviour and actions.
I wish you all the best for your future. And thank you for bringing
different viewpoints,ideas and directions to the community effort,
including those opinions that others did not agree with. Different
viewpoints are very important for any project and should be valued, even
when we personally get a bit annoyed about them at times. Making a
compromise here, can benefit the whole community.
Regards,
Tristan