Re: Recent letter to the Kalamazoo Gazette

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx>]

bob@acm.org wrote:
> Thanks for all the impressions and thoughts, I am persuing this
> with Dirk Bartley, our chairman, and we will decide what to do
> as an official reaction from KLUG on this whole thing.
> My personal sense of this is that KLUG has nothing to APOLOGIZE
> for, although it may certainly be appropriate to express REGRET
> that something like this would take place. I also feel that we must
> pin down the medium in which this happened (e-mail or face-to-face),
> and see the actual text that caused this reaction (if it is indeed
> e-mail) in order to formulate a good response. Some may think that
> this is splitting hairs; I want to be "shown the source" before I
> decide exactly how to respond.
> Either Dirk or I will keep everyone informed on how we will handle
> this. Thanks again for the ideas and responses.

I totally agree with your move to talk of "Regret" instead of moving
to "Apologize."

If anything, here's my "proposed letter":

Dear [editor]:

As members of the Kalamazoo Linux User Group, commonly known as
KLUG, we find it unfortunately that Mr. [article author]'s
experiences with our organization have been not to his liking.  As
members of the Linux community, we have been completely dumbfounded
by his recent commentary in your publication.  The greater Linux
community, which consists of independent LUGs just like ourselves
spread all over the globe, has won repeated awards again and again
from respected IT organizations and publications.  Best of all, all
of these "support services" are offered at no expense to anyone
without prejudice or reservation -- and we still win on pure
technical merits.

As such, we regret in having to refute the following portions of Mr.
[author]'s article, in the hope of clearing our name.

Quoting one of our members:  "'Do it yourself or you'll never
learn.'"

We can only assume this was a mis-quote.  Linux users are always
eager to "do something for you."  But, at the same time, must "help
the user help himself."  Linux is not Windows and there is some
"retraining involved."  Simply doing something for someone,
repeatedly, does not allow the user to learn what he needs to be
productive.  We have seen this happen time and time again, where
users will become "dependent" on always having someone else do
everything for them.  If it was part of our job function, or as a
live-in relative, it would be very easy.  But we are users, donating
our time and expertise for no charge.  But our donations must stop
at some end, because many of us have received phone calls in the
middle of the night.  So we do urge try to "help users help
themselves."

"X windows (the Linux GUI) did not support the too-new NeoMagic
chip"

Independent Linux developers have to write 20x as many drivers for
Linux than Microsoft has to write for their own Windows operating
system.  This is the result of many hardware manufacturers not
supporting the Linux operating system.  Although the positive "side
effect" of this is that most Linux drivers are more stable than
Windows ones (because it's not simple a company trying to get a
driver working at minimal cost), people should take note of this
"uphill battle" than non-Microsoft OSes fight daily.

Worse yet, in the case of NeoMagic, the effort is 10x harder because
NeoMagic does not release specifications for its products.  So even
in writing our own drivers, we incur additional, often frustrating
and painful, reverse engineering time and effort -- which is not
only illegal in some countries, but even two US states now (Maryland
and Virginia).  As such, we urge Mr. [author] to redirect his
frustration towards NeoMagic, who is responsible for the lack of
drivers on the Linux platform.  But as Mr. [author] found out, even
when tasked with both reverse engineering and driver development, we
do eventually release a driver when the manufacturer does their best
to prevent us.

"the email support from NetBSD.org is more timely, far more helpful,
and 
never snotty or condescending."

We would like to point out to Mr. [author] that he is comparing a
_global_ E-mail list, namely of NetBSD.ORG, versus a _local_ E-mail
list, namely of KLUG.  As such, we could not possibly fathom the
ability to offer more experts around the clock.  If Mr. [author]
wanted more timely responses, he should have joined one of the
_global_ Linux E-mail lists, of which there are many (since Linux
users outnumber NetBSD users).

We also want to note that as users of open source software (OSS),
KLUG does not merely limit itself to Linux, but to any OSS operating
system including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, eCos, FreeDOS and a host
of others.  Many of us run and support these other systems -- even
Microsoft, who uses FreeBSD at HotMail.COM and Passport.COM, does
(yes Microsoft still runs UNIX).  To limit ourselves to a single
community effort could and should be considered bigotry and we will
have no part of it.

In conclusion, we regret we must disagree with Mr. [author]'s
assestment of our organization, which reflects on the overall
opinion of Linux and other LUGs worldwide.  Linux is about the
community building a better future were users matter, helping those
users without prejudice and always promoting the best solutions,
even if that means solutions other than Linux.  We hope Mr. [author]
the best of luck in any and all of his OSS endeavors and hope he
will reconsider the points we make in the preceding response.

In fact, since LUGs are about sharing knowledge, we would now wish
to invite maybe Mr. [author] to come share his NetBSD knowledge and
experiences at a future KLUG meeting -- whether formerly (e.g., via
presentation) or informally.

Sincerely,

Members of the Kalamazoo Linux Users' Group

-- TheBS

P.S.  I'm in Orlando, so don't quote me (just feel free to go with
it from there).  ;-PPP  I'm sure that would be interesting (Orlando
member comments on Michigan newsreporter about a Michigan user
group?),


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, President        mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
(407)366-7013 pager:(888)694-5793 chat:thebs413@AOL/MS/Yho
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