Also having said developers take their point of view (properly referenced
and footnoted of course) to their blogs to vent about it and then being
syndicated in the "Planet Gentoo" feed is probably not a good solution
either.  It leaked out of various clandestine lists and some published lists
to the user base at large, which gives the impression that if this is what
we can see as users how much of the iceberg is still remaining below the
surface of the water.  It's a two way street.  We (the users) have to be
understanding that for 90% of the developers Gentoo is a volunteer project
that they (the developers) take on and conversely that they (the developers)
need to understand that we (the users) choose to use Gentoo for the feature
set that is provided with the distribution.

On 4/3/07, Dave Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi Markus

Markus Schönhaber wrote on 03/04/07 13:15:

>> Recently there has been a lot of unpleasant noise about conflicts and
>> disagreements among the Gentoo developers. I hope that they will
resolve
>> their (mainly political) problems soon. The stories have not been good
>> for the image of Gentoo, either as an organisation or as a
distribution.

> Yep, I was a bit shocked when I read the news about the Code of Conduct
on the
> Gentoo homepage. My first thought was: if a community considers it
necessary
> to decide upon a document that is stating the obvious by essentially
> saying "be respectful to others instead of treating them like shit" then
> there must have been something going badly wrong beforehand.

I too was somewhat taken aback when I read the Code of Conduct. However,
when I read some of the exchanges between the developers, I understand
why a Code of Conduct was imposed. Some of the 'conversations' were
unbelievably hostile, rude, insulting and outrageously over-heated.

I fully understand that developers are rightly proud of their efforts,
and may be sometimes a little over-sensitive to criticism. However, the
tone of some of those emails was disrespectful, negative, rude, to the
point of being childishly vicious. I'm hardly surprised that Gentoo has
recently lost some very talented developers.

Before any developer roasts me, I am criticising only the savage tone of
those emails, not the people involved in these exchanges.  Believe me,
as a mere end-user I am more than grateful for the time and effort that
the developers have invested in the Gentoo project.

> This impression of mine may be wrong since I'm not informed about the
> internals of the Gentoo dev community, but I would bet I'm not the only
one
> who had this - or a similar - impression.

Unfortunately, news of developer conflicts has leaked into the public
domain. This has encouraged some of the gentlemen of the press to spread
rumours that Gentoo is dying. Quite a change from when Gentoo was the
darling of the press, just a year or so ago.

Let's hope that the developer issues are solved before the rumours about
the impending death of Gentoo become reality.

Losing Gentoo would be an enormous loss to the Open Source community.

Cheers, Dave
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