Everyone,
As I noted yesterday, I replied to Dave C's post on Slashdot. He has posted a response to what I feel was accurate information from those on this list that were supporting LRP and the present condition to the LEAF variants as they compare to the last released LRP today. I feel those of us that used to support LRP itself before LEAF was started may find Dave C's post more than a little interesting.
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=68562&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=106&mode=thread&cid=6282059
At this point, I am not sure that I would be the 'best' person to reply as many of his comments are better answered by those who did more support and development work than I did at the time. It appears that I jumped on a button that triggered more than I expected. It is likely best that I keep my feelings to myself for the present time and let those reply that can more accurately do so while I think about the reply.
Lynn, perhaps the best person to respond is nobody. After all, it's only Slashdot, a site that acts like it is important but, at least these days, seems to me more like a quaint relic of the dot-com days than a central clearing house for the opinions of those who matter. LEAF has been mentioned, complete with URL, several times in the thread. People interested in using Linux as a router can look here and see if Dave is correct in his characterization; people not interested in that use can ... well, who cares what they do?
Anyone who comes here will be able to read yesterday's traffic, which includes:
1. Charles' excellent overview of the history of what happened.
2. Mike's excellent timeline of events.
3. An exchange that identifies the substance of the occasion on which "for single day [Dave] pulled [his] entire network offilne as an act of protest". Perhaps the most amusing (no, not amusing; sad, really) thing about Dave's response is how careful he is not to mention the content of his "act of protest".
Perhaps one thing in Dave's remarks does, perhaps, deserve added comment. I am, as old-timers will know and others probably guess, the "Ray" he refers to when he says: "The only thing anybody ever did fully and did really well was Ray handling bounces on the mailing list." I also wrote some "how to get started" material that he actually made available on the ftp site (in a "contrib" section), and he took a couple of suggestions I offered about the Web site (providing a link to c0wz, for example), but perhaps he didn't seen that effort as valuable.
I did do the mailing-list chores for about 6 months, and it wasn't fun. My intent was to demonstrate to Dave my reliability, as a first step to getting more involved in actual LRP development. It didn't work. To get him even to consider any suggestion at all, I had to be extraordinary self-effacing and fawning in my style -- traits that those of you who know me realize are not my metier. He really wanted an assistant, not a colleague. And he wasn't even that good at using an assistant, since the one other thing he asked me to do (find a better version-control system than CVS) went nowhere when he wouldn't respond to my questions (along the lines of: "What is it that don't you like about CVS?", so I could know what he might like "better").
After six months, he got annoyed at some skeptical comments I made in an e-mail exchange ... I suggested he needed to write something that explained why LRP was distinctive and special, and he read that as an attack on LRP's worth ... and he told me to shut up or get out. I took his ultimatum as an opportunity to escape a responsibility I had, by then, very much regretted accepting.
Maybe the most telling thing about Dave's comment is that he values petty scut work over the real development work that was done by Charles, David, Matthew, and others, and real documentation and troubleshooting work by Rick, Mike, and others (including me). Shame on him.
While I do not want to minimize the role of the McVeigh statement in precipitating the departure of the developer community from LRP to LEAF -- personally, I would have walked away that day even if no alternative to LRP existed -- neither do I want to exaggerate it. Prior to June 11, Dave had eroded any good will he had earned from developers, troubleshooters, and even some ordinary users ... good will he deserved for his foundational work on LRP, but good will that was not infinite in depth ... by his cavalier dismissal of the work of others and his pervasively insulting tone to developers and users both (remember "idiot images"?).
LRP developers, troubleshooters, and some users had been building the LEAF site as a workaround for months by June 11. What the McVeigh incident did was shift people from "workaround" mode to "independent" mode. The most readily visible sign of the shift: traffic on the LRP mailing list dropped by 75-80% after June 12. And LEAF itself took off, starting with its lists and building to what it is today.
In the end though ... after having written all of this ... I still question the value of reliving ancient history. Why not just let Dave bluster? He can't hurt us ... it's only words, not "sticks and stones", after all.
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