Ex Red Hatter turned to the dark side?

[Jeremy Brown]

Sean Estabrooks wrote:

>On Thu, 27 May 2004 10:41:36 -0500
>Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>My last post on this topic (and probably on this list - I thought it was
>>supposed to be about Fedora Core releases).
>>    
>>
>
>If public statements from a previous employee of the company that
>is the driving force behind Fedora, which are designed to undermine 
>our community isn't relevant to this list, what is?   
>  
>
What will push Fedora into obscurity are things like being difficult to 
use, being unreliable, and having a community that won't help out.  
These are much more real threats than an ex-RedHat employee having a 
mysterious "change of heart" after being hired by Microsoft.

>Are we supposed to just keep talking about bug reports while Microsoft
>and their new mouthpiece try to push us into obscurity or worse?   It 
>seems understanding what we're up against is perfectly relevant.
>  
>
Hmm...but the only people listening on this list are Fedora users.  
Chris Sharp told his story outside Redmond, which is why you heard it.  
If he'd expressed his "opinions" on "windows-list at microsoft.com" (or 
wherever, you get the point) then we wouldn't be having this 
discussion.  By contrast, the only people who will ever hear your 
rebuttle right now are Fedora users.

I just saw your response to Travis as well.  I don't think anyone's 
disputing that alterting the list about issues like this and having a 
little discussion are good things.  But a thread like this has huge 
potential to erupt into a "you're momma's so fat" kind of flamewar, 
which just clutters this list and distracts from users who have much 
more legitimate (and much less sensational) questions to ask.  If these 
users can't find answers, many will go elsewhere to more sympathetic 
ears, be it another distribution or another OS entirely.

If you're really concerned that Fedora's appearance is being damaged by 
this guy, maybe the Fedora community should have an "official" PR 
response?  Personally, I don't give much weight to Mr. Sharp.  There's 
plenty of real world proof that open source solutions work well, and can 
even be beneficial for small software businesses, and Sharp's 
credibility is undermined by the fact that he works for Microsoft now.  
Only staunch Microsoft supporters (who wouldn't have chosen open source 
anyway) will really fall into this trap.

Jeremy