What's not to rely on? The distribution itself was never in danger. The only thing Lance controlled was the domain name, some IRC channels, and the PayPal account. Now Lance has handed those things over, and they'll move forward with a foundation to control the project.
First, the existence of the project was never in doubt, and it didn't all depend on Lance--he owned the domain and had access to the PayPal accounts. Important bits, but not at all project-threatening.
Second, CentOS isn't created by a company, it's created by a set of volunteers relying on donated hardware and time. If Lance was found in a ditch, they'd create a new domain name and a new PayPal account, and continue as before with no disruption to the distribution.
It's regrettable that they had to resort to public pressure to get Lance to hand over those parts for which he was solely in control, but they did it, and it worked, and they'll go forward with the foundation setup that works so well for a variety of other OSS projects.
Isn't that just what this article is about? Lance Davis is AWOL for almost a year, the rest of the project publishes an open letter, Davis shows up and hands over the keys. What more resolution is needed?
In a way, this gives me some more confidence in CentOS, insofar as the rest of the admins were willing to "break glass in case of emergency" and deal with Davis' erratic leadership. They spent a long time trying to deal with it quietly and internally, but when it came down to it, they basically removed him the way all OSS projects end up doing it, with public pressure.
Personnel problems aside, they're quite good at tracking Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so you get all the bugfixes and stability testing of a paid staff of one of the most serious distros around, for free. And since what they do is conceptually simple (download and compile the RHEL sources, make packages available), there's really no silliness around particular maintainer's ideas about what the distro should be. All they really have to do is be timely with their updates, and they're pretty good at that.
Ah yes, the tarpit that is making use of a.emacs file to get everything just so.
I kid because I love. I've actually got a.emacs file customizing the colouring and everything. But every time I want to adjust something, and struggle to remember whether it's M-x custom-face or M-x customize-lock, I want to punch the screen.
Thank God you don't have an agenda. You just have the plain, unvarnished truth to share with us. Finally, a simple, factual truth-teller to cut through all the leftist propaganda that passes for 'discourse' these days.
There really aren't enough plainspoken men of the soil around these days, are there? Hunted to extinction, they've been...
In the aftermath of a buyout, three employees trying to jack their soon-to-be-former employer for a raise is a recipe for negative attention.
The thing about the aftermath of a buyout is that the purchaser (legitimately) takes months or years to understand what they've bought, and decide what to keep and what to prune. Unless Oracle bought Sun to get Jruby, then calling attention to yourself by seeking a counteroffer is a good way to move to the top of the "keep or cut?" list, and in a way that makes cutting all the more likely.
And generally speaking, "large, deep-pockets organization(s)" are no more stable than a startup, from the grunt's perspective. At any moment, you're one spreadsheet away from being laid off to improve the quarterly statements.
I think it was more something like "Engine Yard wants to hire all three of us. Oracle won't give us a yes or a no on whether we'll even be here next week, and the magic eight ball says 'outlook not so good'. Let's take the offer we have in hand where someone in management will at least know we exist."
I worked for a Fortune 100 that took two years to getting around to closing our office--that's how long it took them to notice we were there and bother to send out layoff notices. Between continued employment at a place like that and a place where someone actually wants to employ me, I'll take the latter.
I was just going to write this comment myself. The biggest advantage of PHP is that you go from zero to tangible results very quickly. No programming language is going to be interesting to teenagers if they can't instantly do something useful with it, and to a teenager, cool web stuff is the useful thing that they're most likely to be trying to do.
No, because (despite what I said above) there are still differences between the various platforms, and it's hard to keep them all straight, so adding another combo to the mix doesn't seem justified by some gains in doing things the Ruby Way. And doing Python/Django already , I don't expect to see a huge leap in productivity with Ruby on Rails, since both cover approximately the same niche.
My web programming experience agrees with this, especially as I move back and forth between PHP, Python, Java, and C# (and their various frameworks). The same patterns occur, the same solutions are the best, and the same general attitude towards creating robust, maintainable code is rewarded in each.
The obvious solution for much of Wikipedia's image needs is for talented users to take their own photographs of a page's subject and submit them under whatever licence Wikipedia prefers.
With that, I give you a snippet from the User Talk page of Richie X, an entirely too enthusiastic submitter of homemade photographs in the category "genitals" (no pictures on the linked page, thankfully):
If you wish to show your equipment to the world, there's about a billion pages out there to do that. I however do not believe this to be the goal of Wikipedia, Commons, or any related project. And in accordance with Note: This gallery does not need more general home-made images of penises. If you upload a home-made photo of your penis, do not be surprised if it gets deleted. in the header of the Penis-Gallery, I will continue to delete home-made pictures without any encyclopedic use. Lennert B 17:26, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Images despoticly deleted by Lennert B were primarily in the category shaved genitalia, there are not many male images in this category. Obviously Lennert B wants omnipotently keep only female images there. This is not a suitable or an equal way of handling things under admin rights. Richiex 13:18, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
This is exactly the outcome to be avoided: You harass me to the point of suing, and the burden is on me to find another job.
More practically, suing is effectively quitting, but it at least grants a sufficient severance payment that the burden of being forced to quit for someone else's behavior (and the company's indifference) is alleviated.
If you sue the company, no matter the outcome, you will not work there for long.
This is true or false depending very much on your circumstances. Basically, the larger the company in North America (and, I think, Europe), the safer you are from retaliatory firing, because they run things in a more organized, formal way, and it's easier to relocate you within the company. The problem with suing a small company is that everyone gets pissed off. In a large company, you can go to other departments where the people don't have anything invested in getting rid of you.
I can speak from experience that employees who go through formal complaint procedures against a company (meaning the U.S. National Labor Relations Board) can and do remain employed.
Why do you assume that the internal complaint procedure was not used? In my experience at Fortune 500 companies, almost all harassment complaints did use an internal complaint procedure, and were suitably resolved. And you know what? The media didn't print stories on them that got linked by./ so people like you could judge the validity of the complaint. Your perception that this went from 0 to lawsuit is almost certainly wrong.
As for your example of the job you'd offer, the marketplace is not the be-all and end-all of our society, thankfully.
In fact, most people would agree that the problem of "racism" is largely maintained by those who benefit the most from it and isn't nearly the problem at large that it once was.
I think you're just wrong about this point, but besides that, most people don't suffer from racism, so it's easy to see the hubbub about it as uppity minorities demanding special rights. It looks a lot different from the other side.
Why is it okay to call to call you a "cunt" outside of work, but bad inside of work?
It's not okay to call you a "cunt" outside of work, but outside of work I'm not required to be in your presence. Outside of work I can walk away. I can refuse to socialize with you. At work, I don't have that freedom, at least not without suffering for it. Why should I have to give up my job to escape your abuse?
Either the speech is offensive or it is not. Either we need to be protected from it or we do not. There is no "kinda-sorta" about it.
There is, however, context to it. A random stranger yelling "cunt" at me from across the street is a very different thing than my boss doing it. When it's my boss, I'm forced to either 1) accept being called "cunt" as a condition of continued employment or 2) find another job, putting a burden on me if I don't want to be addressed as "cunt", and for no other reason than you're an asshole--not for anything I've done.
I mean, seriously, what are you trying to do? Make the workplace the only safe place?
We're trying to avoid forcing people to choose between keeping a paycheck and not tolerating abuse.
As I pointed out to someone else, the perception that every potentially offensive comment is met with a lawsuit comes from the fact that you never hear about the internal disciplinary action that addresses it otherwise. The media only reports on major lawsuits against major corporations and public institutions. Why are you assuming that this issue of domelights.com and black officers went from 0 to lawsuit overnight?
In both Fortune 500 companies I've worked at, I've seen harassing behavior addressed by managers, everything from telling a dirty joke to cornering a subordinate and touching them inappropriately. In all cases, the behavior was changed or the person was fired. No lawyers were involved and the media didn't report on it. That's the vast majority of harassment problems right there.
Let's continue my hypothetical above: I ask you to stop telling me about your websurfing, and you don't. I go to my manager and say "please tell him to stop" and my manager says "toughen up, baby." I go to HR and they do nothing about it. I go to my manager's boss and he says "let your boss and HR deal with it." What are my options then besides suing the company?
It would indeed be a double standard if it existed, and it would be just as wrong if the genders/races were reversed. Having watched a female manager get disciplined for sexually harassing a male subordinate, I'm sceptical that such a double standard actually exists except in the minds of angry white males who imagine they're being oppressed.
But black and female people have long since expired their period of needing special treatment and are fully equal in opportunity and respect as far as I can tell.
It only seems certain because you don't hear about these issues until the press picks up on a major lawsuit. Just because you don't see news stories about employee A complaining about employee B, and management reprimanding employee B's for their behavior, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
It depends on what the programmer chooses to mention. If he likes to start discussions on the content of technology stories posted here, it's not harassment. If he likes to report on how many 'gay nigger' comments there were the day before, that's harassment. See the difference?
Domelights.com has a serious problem with racist cops posting there. If you like to tell your black coworkers the racist jokes that you saw on domelights the day before, it's pretty much the same as if you just tell the jokes.
Slashdot Mirror
What's not to rely on? The distribution itself was never in danger. The only thing Lance controlled was the domain name, some IRC channels, and the PayPal account. Now Lance has handed those things over, and they'll move forward with a foundation to control the project.
Your loss.
First, the existence of the project was never in doubt, and it didn't all depend on Lance--he owned the domain and had access to the PayPal accounts. Important bits, but not at all project-threatening.
Second, CentOS isn't created by a company, it's created by a set of volunteers relying on donated hardware and time. If Lance was found in a ditch, they'd create a new domain name and a new PayPal account, and continue as before with no disruption to the distribution.
It's regrettable that they had to resort to public pressure to get Lance to hand over those parts for which he was solely in control, but they did it, and it worked, and they'll go forward with the foundation setup that works so well for a variety of other OSS projects.
Isn't that just what this article is about? Lance Davis is AWOL for almost a year, the rest of the project publishes an open letter, Davis shows up and hands over the keys. What more resolution is needed?
In a way, this gives me some more confidence in CentOS, insofar as the rest of the admins were willing to "break glass in case of emergency" and deal with Davis' erratic leadership. They spent a long time trying to deal with it quietly and internally, but when it came down to it, they basically removed him the way all OSS projects end up doing it, with public pressure.
Personnel problems aside, they're quite good at tracking Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so you get all the bugfixes and stability testing of a paid staff of one of the most serious distros around, for free. And since what they do is conceptually simple (download and compile the RHEL sources, make packages available), there's really no silliness around particular maintainer's ideas about what the distro should be. All they really have to do is be timely with their updates, and they're pretty good at that.
Ah yes, the tarpit that is making use of a .emacs file to get everything just so.
I kid because I love. I've actually got a .emacs file customizing the colouring and everything. But every time I want to adjust something, and struggle to remember whether it's M-x custom-face or M-x customize-lock, I want to punch the screen.
*good* syntax highlighting? It looks like my kid threw up fruit loops all over my screen. It's even worse with 16 bit colours enabled.
Thank God you don't have an agenda. You just have the plain, unvarnished truth to share with us. Finally, a simple, factual truth-teller to cut through all the leftist propaganda that passes for 'discourse' these days.
There really aren't enough plainspoken men of the soil around these days, are there? Hunted to extinction, they've been...
In the aftermath of a buyout, three employees trying to jack their soon-to-be-former employer for a raise is a recipe for negative attention.
The thing about the aftermath of a buyout is that the purchaser (legitimately) takes months or years to understand what they've bought, and decide what to keep and what to prune. Unless Oracle bought Sun to get Jruby, then calling attention to yourself by seeking a counteroffer is a good way to move to the top of the "keep or cut?" list, and in a way that makes cutting all the more likely.
And generally speaking, "large, deep-pockets organization(s)" are no more stable than a startup, from the grunt's perspective. At any moment, you're one spreadsheet away from being laid off to improve the quarterly statements.
I think it was more something like "Engine Yard wants to hire all three of us. Oracle won't give us a yes or a no on whether we'll even be here next week, and the magic eight ball says 'outlook not so good'. Let's take the offer we have in hand where someone in management will at least know we exist."
I worked for a Fortune 100 that took two years to getting around to closing our office--that's how long it took them to notice we were there and bother to send out layoff notices. Between continued employment at a place like that and a place where someone actually wants to employ me, I'll take the latter.
I was just going to write this comment myself. The biggest advantage of PHP is that you go from zero to tangible results very quickly. No programming language is going to be interesting to teenagers if they can't instantly do something useful with it, and to a teenager, cool web stuff is the useful thing that they're most likely to be trying to do.
No, because (despite what I said above) there are still differences between the various platforms, and it's hard to keep them all straight, so adding another combo to the mix doesn't seem justified by some gains in doing things the Ruby Way. And doing Python/Django already , I don't expect to see a huge leap in productivity with Ruby on Rails, since both cover approximately the same niche.
My web programming experience agrees with this, especially as I move back and forth between PHP, Python, Java, and C# (and their various frameworks). The same patterns occur, the same solutions are the best, and the same general attitude towards creating robust, maintainable code is rewarded in each.
The obvious solution for much of Wikipedia's image needs is for talented users to take their own photographs of a page's subject and submit them under whatever licence Wikipedia prefers.
With that, I give you a snippet from the User Talk page of Richie X, an entirely too enthusiastic submitter of homemade photographs in the category "genitals" (no pictures on the linked page, thankfully):
You win the perennial ./ competition to see who can be the most cynical, irrespective of reality.
You didn't get married, but you sure got raped!
This is exactly the outcome to be avoided: You harass me to the point of suing, and the burden is on me to find another job.
More practically, suing is effectively quitting, but it at least grants a sufficient severance payment that the burden of being forced to quit for someone else's behavior (and the company's indifference) is alleviated.
This is true or false depending very much on your circumstances. Basically, the larger the company in North America (and, I think, Europe), the safer you are from retaliatory firing, because they run things in a more organized, formal way, and it's easier to relocate you within the company. The problem with suing a small company is that everyone gets pissed off. In a large company, you can go to other departments where the people don't have anything invested in getting rid of you.
I can speak from experience that employees who go through formal complaint procedures against a company (meaning the U.S. National Labor Relations Board) can and do remain employed.
Why do you assume that the internal complaint procedure was not used? In my experience at Fortune 500 companies, almost all harassment complaints did use an internal complaint procedure, and were suitably resolved. And you know what? The media didn't print stories on them that got linked by ./ so people like you could judge the validity of the complaint. Your perception that this went from 0 to lawsuit is almost certainly wrong.
As for your example of the job you'd offer, the marketplace is not the be-all and end-all of our society, thankfully.
I think you're just wrong about this point, but besides that, most people don't suffer from racism, so it's easy to see the hubbub about it as uppity minorities demanding special rights. It looks a lot different from the other side.
I would hope that people think of policing as a job requiring a high degree of professionalism, given the stakes involved.
It's not okay to call you a "cunt" outside of work, but outside of work I'm not required to be in your presence. Outside of work I can walk away. I can refuse to socialize with you. At work, I don't have that freedom, at least not without suffering for it. Why should I have to give up my job to escape your abuse?
There is, however, context to it. A random stranger yelling "cunt" at me from across the street is a very different thing than my boss doing it. When it's my boss, I'm forced to either 1) accept being called "cunt" as a condition of continued employment or 2) find another job, putting a burden on me if I don't want to be addressed as "cunt", and for no other reason than you're an asshole--not for anything I've done.
We're trying to avoid forcing people to choose between keeping a paycheck and not tolerating abuse.
As I pointed out to someone else, the perception that every potentially offensive comment is met with a lawsuit comes from the fact that you never hear about the internal disciplinary action that addresses it otherwise. The media only reports on major lawsuits against major corporations and public institutions. Why are you assuming that this issue of domelights.com and black officers went from 0 to lawsuit overnight?
In both Fortune 500 companies I've worked at, I've seen harassing behavior addressed by managers, everything from telling a dirty joke to cornering a subordinate and touching them inappropriately. In all cases, the behavior was changed or the person was fired. No lawyers were involved and the media didn't report on it. That's the vast majority of harassment problems right there.
Let's continue my hypothetical above: I ask you to stop telling me about your websurfing, and you don't. I go to my manager and say "please tell him to stop" and my manager says "toughen up, baby." I go to HR and they do nothing about it. I go to my manager's boss and he says "let your boss and HR deal with it." What are my options then besides suing the company?
It would indeed be a double standard if it existed, and it would be just as wrong if the genders/races were reversed. Having watched a female manager get disciplined for sexually harassing a male subordinate, I'm sceptical that such a double standard actually exists except in the minds of angry white males who imagine they're being oppressed.
You're just stupidly, sadly wrong in this.
It only seems certain because you don't hear about these issues until the press picks up on a major lawsuit. Just because you don't see news stories about employee A complaining about employee B, and management reprimanding employee B's for their behavior, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
It depends on what the programmer chooses to mention. If he likes to start discussions on the content of technology stories posted here, it's not harassment. If he likes to report on how many 'gay nigger' comments there were the day before, that's harassment. See the difference?
Domelights.com has a serious problem with racist cops posting there. If you like to tell your black coworkers the racist jokes that you saw on domelights the day before, it's pretty much the same as if you just tell the jokes.