On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 12:06:13PM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote: > It may also be that they are not totally able to be totally open and > forthright. I would request that you consider carefully before damaging > your relationship with the people here in favour of attempting to force > Mandrakesoft to release information they need not disclose to the public.
I can assure you that is not the case. They are simply choosing not to release this information. It makes them look rather bad. Many people already feel that Mandrakesoft sits on things. Consider how they handled the financial information. It took them a long time to get around to explaining to the general public about the whole e-learning situation and what it meant. Mandrakesoft as a publicly traded company owes it's shareholders the truth. As an open source company it owes it's contributors the truth, even if it isn't required to give it. With the arrival of François Bancilhon, Mandrake appeared to start providing the truth to us. I don't know if this is simply circumstantial or not. But from my interaction with him on the phone I'd have to think not. > That works both ways. Please make absolutely clear (on your site) that > you don't represent other non-Mandrakesoft contributors (which many > people, possibly including the Debain folk who posted here, may have > assumed) unless you do, and list those who feel you represent them. I never ever said I spoke for anyone else. Though from the emails I receive I happen to know there are other people who agree with me. But it's not my place to speak for them. They are free to speak for themselves. Posting a rant to my personal website couldn't be more clear that it's just my opinion. I really can't control what assumptions people make outside what I say. > BTW, you may want to update your rant, since some of your statements are > no longer true: In progress. But I'm not going to be editing the previous one. > For example: > "Finally, Mandrake has produced MNF and appears to be hinting that they > will be charging for security updates for it. That's right folks. They > will be charging you for updates to a firewall. This is exactly the type > "security for sale" policy that Vincent complained about on his website > with regards to ISC's BIND (the DNS server that most everyone runs). Yet > here is Mandrake engaging in it. This is terribly unfortunate. Attempts > to clarify this issue were simply ignored." > > ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/mandrake/mandrake/updates/mnf8.2/ Which begs the question... why are they still offering to sell security updates at $5/month if you can download them for free? http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/mnf/pricing My understanding from my conversation with Vincent is that you can't update via the web interface in MNF unless you pay the $5. So far I haven't even bothered to burn the ISO for MNF. Partly because Mandrake hasn't responded to the potential issues I raised questions about. So for most people as far as they know the updates aren't available for free. > Also, on the matter of signing ISOs, you don't provide any suggestions > as to how to accomplish this easily enough that users (that currently > have trouble verifying the md5sums) would be able to verify. Easy? How hard is it to type: md5sum -c whatever.md5 or gpg --verify whatever.asc Simply provide a readme with the ISOs that explains how to burn them and also how to verify that they are legit. However, I've already had this battle about the ISOs off this list. The powers that be felt that signing the md5sum's was the proper thing to do. > It would of course probably be more contructive to post each of your > issues on this list rather than publish your rants on your webpage. Everything in that rant had been broached either on this list or to other employees directly who were responsible for the item. E.G. (Also note that while you can't see this Jacques and Gael were both CC'ed on that post, which has had *ZERO* response from employees) http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=mandrake-cooker&m=104019331408412&w=2 The issues with my stock had been emailed back and forth with Jacques... basically I got the run around on that until shortly after the article was published. I took the issues of singing the ISOs up with Vincent Danen, who agreeded but other people disagreed and did something different. So basically, things that I thought were appropriate for this list have already been brought up here. If not they were brought up with the appropriate employees. I'd much rather have things handled than have to post a "rant" about them. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion only of her own." -- John Quincy Adams, July 4th, 1821
