On Thu, 28 Nov 2002 01:24:24 -0500, David Weeks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I live in Florida. Tampa specifically, which is a great city, even if I do
live here. And know what is perpetually annoying? Yankees coming down
talking about how they do it up North.
I live in Belgium. Liège specifically, which is a great city as well.
I am French-speaking but I work in Germany (in English) for a Swedish
company. And you know what is perpetually annoying? Guys who think
they know everything but apparently ignore what tolerance and openness
mean. Guys who are not open to other points of view. Guys who have
very important rants to write and cannot afford to spend five minutes
or their precious time trying to understand others. Guys who flame
others for no reason.
For those of recent (that being within the last couple of years) arrival to
the world of GNU/Linux/Open Source, live here a while before you go telling
us how you did it back home.
I arrived to the wonderful world of Linux a couple of months after
Linux was announced in comp.os.minix. Before that, I had already a
couple of years of experience with Free Software (gcc, emacs, ...) on
various *nix platforms (Ultrix, SunOS, HP-UX, ...). The best thing
about Free Software (and more recently, Open Source) is that it was
(and still is) a welcoming community. I remember the cooperative
attitude of those who accepted (or rejected) my first patches or my
first questions to some GNU programs or to the X11 system. In some
cases, they told me that I was wrong, but usually by telling me why
and suggesting alternatives. Of course, there are always some
holier-than-thou individuals on some mailing lists and newsgroups who
will give a bad image to the whole community, but it does not take
long to identify them and ignore them.
Welcome to GNU/Linux/Open Source computing.
Yours seems to be a very small and restrictive world. Fortunately,
this is not the world that I am living in. I am glad to work on Free
and Open Source software. I am glad that it works for Windows, MacOS
X, Solaris, IRIX, *BSD and other systems such as Linux. I am glad
that the software is there to serve the needs of many users regardless
of their culture, opinions, level of experience or choice of operating
system(s). I am glad that some developers who have worked hard and
enhanced some *nix program are also trying to port it to Windows or
MacOS X so that more users can benefit from it.
The reason why (and I remember being a newbee, thinking guys like who I am now
are just arrogant assholes, stuck in the past) we do things in *nix the way
we do is because it works. I has worked for a long time, and being that it
works, why make changes for constantly changing dialect, or drop well founded
methods cause newbees find them too hard?
Sometimes I am a *nix bigot or a Free Software bigot. I enjoy showing
others how some of their problems can be solved easily by using an
appropriate Free Software tool or a *nix operating system. But I also
accept the fact that there are other solutions out there, and I try to
understand what is good or bad about them instead of rejecting them
immediately. If someone proposes to change something and add or drop
some feature, then I try to understand their reasons instead of
telling them immediately that they are wrong. I also try to
understand who they are before calling them newbies.
[...]
My apologies to those who are right now saying: Duh? But from what I've
been reading on this list, a teacher's corrections are in order.
Any self-respecting teacher will make sure that he knows what he is
talking about before starting his lesson.
Note: I sent this message to the list. If you want to comment on it,
feel free to do so publicly or via private e-mail. However, any
further replies from me on the same topic will be sent by private
e-mail only because I do not think that a long discussion about this
is appropriate for this list.
Best regards,
-Raphaël
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