Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 09:14:54 -0800 (PST)
Message-Id: <200411011714.iA1HEsd4030133@xl2.seyza.com>
From: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
To: cduffy@spamcop.net
In-reply-to: <1099281732.22720.81.camel@localhost> (message from Charles Duffy
	on Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:02:12 -0600)
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] community spirit
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    > From: Charles Duffy <cduffy@spamcop.net>

    > While granting you notice up-front would have been polite, I'm not sure
    > that what Canonical did is something that would necessarily be
    > considered "uncivil". They're starting their own branch with the intent
    > of focusing on a specific featureset -- good for them, and I sincerely
    > hope it results in quality ideas/patches/whatnot being created.

I admit I'm being (formally) fussy and using a pretty strict standard
when I say it's "uncivil".   Their action was not very clearly over
the line into the territory of "civil" and, therefore, I
conservatively call it "uncivil".  That's because they are a
corporation and I think it appropriate that we hold our fictional
citizens to the highest standards.

Is the fork good, bad, indifferent?  Who knows... that's a separate
question.  I have my doubts about the specific /form/ of the fork
because I don't think it will "play well" with the subset of the
community working on the GNU mainline.  There are lots of boring
technical reasons why I think there are better approaches to achieve
their aims but I'll skip those here.   

One point is, though, whatever problems now arise, we're going to be
stuck with the question "Would this problem have come up if Canonical
had been more civil about designing and creating their fork?"   If
they'd been more up-front about it, that question wouldn't be there:
we'd all be able to say "Well, at least we did our best."   As things
stand, none of us can say that.

-t


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