Daniel Dekany wrote:
Wednesday, September 28, 2005, 12:52:26 AM, Will Glass-Husain wrote:
Before this gets out of hand - a quick plea for civility on the list,
thanks. Let's not escalate what is a fairly minor back and forth
discussion. The easiest way to prevent a flame war is to avoid getting
involved in off-topic discussion (or personal issues) or to respond to same.
OOOH MY GOD! I'm so afraid! What a dangerous work we live in! I mean,
what's if the mailing lists suddenly catch fire? All the readers might
suffer 3rd degree burns! And, burning POP3/IMAP servers, smoking core
dumps everywhere... wasteland... civilization is over!
And, poor Kan A boy... it seems he is forced to read All Single Mails
that reaches his mailbox... in which country is he live? Not even Orwell
has dreamt about such a dictatorship!
Seriously... I delete about 50+ mails per day. Because either it's spam,
or I happen to be not interested in that thread. Now, after the core
Vel. people basically decided to ignore Jonathan's mails (right?) hence
not losing time, just what danger do anybody fear from?
Hi Daniel,
I guess the idea is that if you auto-filter the messages, you will not
even be *tempted* to read them. (May the good Lord guard us from
temptation.... :-))
And granted, on various public forums there are people who are very
aggravating and provocative. Then, if you've really resolved to ignore
such a person, the best approach probably is to simply filter out their
messages. That way, you preclude being tempted to respond to any
provocation.
But that is a personal decision one would make for oneself. And you
don't have to justify it to anybody. OTOH, if you are going take a
public stance that somebody's messages are inappropriate and so on, you
have to be willing to forthrightly defend that stance, I think. You have
to say what's inappropriate about the messages and so on. Just telling
people that they shouldn't listen to some guy and then (you know, in
case they're too stupid to figure it out themselves to give them
step-by-step instructions on how to filter the messages out) this is
quite insulting -- not to me, but to all the people on this forum who
are adults and can decide what they want to read.
Right?
I mean, this gets very blatant. There can be little doubt that the
comments I have made that most bothered certain people concern the state
of the Velocity project. Given the animosity towards me, if any of my
comments could be attacked on the grounds of their truthfulness, people
would do so. So, it's tacitly accepted AFAICS that my statements on that
topic have been truthful.
Of course, if you accept that, it also *must* mean that the statements
of Henning and Will on that topic were less than truthful -- "Velocity
is an active project, always has been" and so on.
You know, sometimes things happen unfairly to people, random accidents
and so on, but other times, whatever happens to them is clearly just a
consequence of their own actions. For example, if I had a penchant for
sleeping with children, like Michael Jackson apparently has, and in the
morning I wake up covered with pee, well, this would be a case in point,
right?
I think, by the same token, if you know that a given person is telling
the truth and other people are not being truthful, yet you decide to
filter the messages of the guy who is truthful, and, virtually speaking,
get in bed with the people who don't tell the truth, well.... if (again,
virtually speaking) you end up with pee all over you the next day, then,
it's roughly the same thing, right? Just a consequence of your own
decisions.
Anyway, as regards civility, there is certainly no point in people being
gratuitously rude in an open source community or in any other context.
But, you get a bunch of techie nerds together who often have relatively
undeveloped social skills and things can be a little raw.
To me, rather than civility, the core value that you have to foment is
honesty. We're both admins on the FreeMarker project, and I imagine you
would agree that a little bit of abrasiveness and rudeness can be
tolerated quite easily, especially if the person has contributions to
make technically.
What cannot IMO be tolerated is dishonesty, that people just go around
saying stuff that is not true (!) I've expressed indignation (in private
correspondence) about this stuff, people misrepresenting the state of an
open source project, but OTOH, aside from that, I just don't get it.
Surely that's a basic prerequisite to doing anything technically, isn't
it? If people aren't honest, on what basis can you proceed? Can you
expect anything worthwhile to emerge from a community in which honesty
is not a core value?
I, for one, have severe doubts.
Jonathan Revusky
Best to all.
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