[svlug] with heavy heart... and a sigh.

[Heather Stern]

I see that there are yet more threads and a great many personal opinions
about whatever's going on, either here at the Picnic and who the heck owns
what, and I just have a few points.

Point -1:
SENTINEL VALUE
    I talk too much.  This won't count as short.  Feel free to delete this
    with the rest of the defensive noise and get back to the business you 
    were really up to, getting a graphics station to like its video card,
    arguing the relative benefits of buyig 64 bit, or whatever it is we 
    normally yak about when people aren't stamping around making blood and
    thunder.  

    If you delete this I encourage you to delete all the rest of it too,
    and let all the wasted electrons of anger and wounded pride go back to
    recycle bins where they belong.

Point 0, because computers count from 0:
TABULA RASA

    I am not reading these threads.  I have no interest in participating
    in anybody's mindgames about who owns who or what is the territory
    to fight over or anybody's pantsize whether their knickers are in a
    wad or not.  At all, ever.  The idea of people being owned by another
    person in anything but a consensual sense (such as perhaps marriage,
    where the "ownership" is mutual) is appalling to me, and I am not 
    going to read any of iti, especially anything where anyone at all is
    playing at loudest-wins.

    Do not expect me to read any of the rest of this thread either.  If
    you feel a need to support me or give me comfort, catch me in person, 
    later.

    I've been a part of SVLUG since the days of Carl's Jr only slightly
    overflowing, and I dropped off of bothering to look at flamewars on
    this main list scant months after I started receiving it.

    I have remained part of it past so many in-person flamewars I stopped
    counting them long ago, even the ones that crushed my bones.  SVLUG 
    can only become what we... all of us... make of it... and if all we 
    make of it is hell then that's what it will be, until someone else 
    makes a real move to do something else.

    I understand that some of the writing probably supports things I am
    doing, or that I'm part of,  and other bits of it do not.  I'm still
    not reading them.  But for those of you who've chosen to speak your
    heart and mind - whether I would like what you say or not - thank you 
    for your honesty.  Whatever you want to say to each other should be 
    gentle if you can.  If you cannot, that will manage to speak for you.

    You must, in the end, believe no mind and heart but your own.  Keep 
    them both open;  be yourself.   If you can't manage both these things
    at the same time, there will be times when you and I will clash. 

    Maybe it would be best if it were all simply forgottten.

Point 1:
PARTS VERSUS WHOLE, WHOLE VERSUS PARTS

    Declaring that territory exists, and then refusing to share of it, in
    contexts where things are only capable of working when they are shared,
    is a fundamentally destructive act and I don't even think it is nice.

    I have on past projects found the very idea of this so viscerally 
    disgusting that I refused to buy into the bullying that goes with it
    regardless of pain and dismay.  

    I cannot prevent anyone from labelling me, praising me with brimstone
    and hellfire, or anything else they want to think they are hanging on
    me, awards, gold star for effort, whatever.  I am myself, I do what I
    can, and I will do my best and succeed or fail regardless of even my 
    own best motives.  Turn a project that I am part of into a battlezone
    and I will be too busy trying to make it work regardless to spend any
    effort hating you or pulling any control-game stunts.  When Phil Hughes
    pulled this ownership game on LG I told him to make his completely and
    wildly different view of our project a living and breathing project of
    its own without us and without stealing our projects name from the
    actual people who make it work.   I was not snide in this desire - I 
    really hoped his forums sans editors with sturcture plan had something
    going for it - but it wasn't me that was going to go.  I made him take
    my name off the masthead of his project and I did everything in my chunk
    of the known universe to make it possible for both projects to succeed.

    If Rick Moen wants to fork the Picnix he's welcome to spin up an
    olympic summer games or any other such thing he likes.  It can be
    all his, unless of course he's willing to share, and then something 
    real might come of it.   But it will still contain the flaw of being
    owned instead of shared until a large enough group of people at its
    core makes it real - and once they do, the english words "we" and "us"
    will perfectly well be spoken by them when they're saying and doing 
    things to make it happen.

    The LinuxPicnic is such a well established event in our community that
    I am sure it would have managed to happen even if some terrible traffic
    jam had managed to hold up everyone who spoke louder than a peep from
    showing up until it was three hours late.  It would have disappointed
    many;  but others would have volunteered, thrown themselves in to fill
    the gaps, because it is ours to share, not an owned thing, but an event
    which people are part of.

    if some corporate entities make themselves part of that who are we to
    turn away IBM's too-slow curiosity, USENIX' good cheer, Oracle's pile
    of CDs, or a stack of t-shirts from any number of groups?  We certainly
    didn't turn away Untangle's soda pop.  Some people care about all these
    big names;  some of us only care about a picnic;  many are somewhere in
    between.

    Human involvement cannot be crammed into a boolean.  It is not Rick's
    call to say who is, and is not, a member of the Linux community, not
    just because that's not how 'community' is defined, but because 
    "is/isn't" games are boolean and people just plain aren't.

Point 2: 
RESPECT IS THE COIN OF THE REALM

    I don't feel that there is anything gained by dragging other people's
    pains and sorrows in the mud.  (Jury's still out on draggging my
    own there.)  Still, if there is something wrong, there are people
    who feel compelled to complain.  Complaining is one thing; doing and
    not just complaining is what gets most open source projects going at
    all; making small changes until things actually do whatever everyone
    who put a hand in wanted of it works best - and when those are in
    conflict, then projects fork.

    I respect that Rick believes there's some sort of devilment going on 
    and simply cannot bear to let a corporate entity break something he's
    fond of.  I can respect that without liking how he goes about it and 
    without agreeing with it in this particular case.  I cannot respect 
    when he lets his emotion on exactly this mark turn a perfectly social 
    pizza-and-speakers group into a war zone.  I cannot respect him abusing
    my friends and calling it goodwill for the community.

    IMO the SVLUG group forked off of its parent SVCS a long time before the
    formal arrangement was dropped.  This was pretty close to a done deal
    before I ever heard of SVLUG;  all I ever knew of it were some light
    nods towards possible insurance, and a formal compulsion to announce 
    SVCS at the mic, which was dropped when SVCS was sufficiently
    disorganized to fail to sort out its ongoing bits of paper.  I think it
    got all the straight eventually and still has other groups;  SVLUG had
    been ignoring it so vividly that it wasn't worth an active thread when
    the news came by, and these days nobody who wasn't around back then
    knows at all nor probably cares.  It did no evil to SVLUG, but
    eventually it could be admitted it did no good either, and was history.

    That SVLUG forked off again from Sbay when most of the ideas
    that were at the core of Sbay's original charters came from past
    SVLUG officers and core volunteers is simply origins... of Sbay
    as a corporate entity.  It is not the *only* parent of Sbay;  Sbay
    also had at its heart some batch of UNIX geek BBS people who enjoyed
    goofing with UUCP, other people among those who were such geeks that
    UUCP wasn't geeky enough, a few ham people, some crazy Linux folks
    who claimed no particular affiliation, and some people who don't care
    so much to pigeonhole themselves as to go to techie events and see
    who they can meet and what they can learn.  Sbay also had as some
    hint to origin the concept Josef Grosch pushed for awhile - an "uber
    group" meeting or organization of the people around the valley who
    make ourselves part of so many things should be a real group with
    some paper status, able to make deals that benefit us all with corps
    out there who would much rather deal with a paper entity than with
    a bunch of longhair techie nerds.

    SVLUG was Sbay's parent, or not - was its child, or not - but it
    doesn't matter;  the two groups do their things entirely different
    ways now, but that doesn't mean SVLUG folk should never eat pizza just
    because Sbay has occasional pizza meets, nor that Sbay folks would
    never touch Linux because that's something SVLUG does.

    The kind of forced distinction along such lines that gets called for
    when these things are mentioned in the same place is as mystifying to me
    as expecting that all your water bottles would disappear, plastic and
    all, when you start driving towards a desert because deserts don't have 
    enough water, by definition.  

    At Sbay meetings, when SVLUG is brought up, it is simply said that SVLUG
    matters are off topic there, and after perhaps a brief pause for a
    sentence to grind to a halt, everyone there respects that.

    I could tell you what Sbay has become, but it would for the most part
    be off topic for this location, and it might be nice if I respectfully
    let even this paragraph grind to a halt.  Sbay rewrote itself vastly;
    if you hold to a view that is borne out of something it had been when
    it was younger, you are not looking at what Sbay really does or is,
    and cannot thereby be expected to respect what it has actually become.

    Sbay is nothing more and absolutely nothing less than a bunch of friends
    getting together and Doing Cool Stuff(tm) with some corporate paperfluff
    to describe how we actually do that.  The people are important.  The 
    cool stuff is important and often interesting and occasionally none of
    anyone's business who's not part of it.  The corporate paperfluff is 
    paper.  It's only important if you think paper is.

Point 3:
THE NATURE OF FRIENDSHIP

    I have, across many years, considered Rick Moen to be a friend of
    mine, and trusted him with some of my pains and sorrows.  I had
    believed that he considered himself to be a friend to me.  But he has
    no respect for my projects and no patience nor interest of hearing about
    my hopes, fears, pains or joys regarding these projects when they seem
    to him to represent bullying of something he considers his; no interest
    in hearing the how or the why of a thing;  when he demanded an
    explanation he stopped listening after the part he heard didn't include
    an instant reversal in his favour.

    I had the *ability* to do that, but I then under the fury of his
    anger at any possible delay saw that it was unwise to reverse the
    coordinating crew's decisions, and felt used and appalled.  I had
    almost by his own good cheer and my own natural preferece toward
    goodwill become exactly the wicked gerfingerpoken president he
    has been claiming and expecting of me, and harmed others besides -
    good people, and an all too few batch of us, who were trying to get
    a lot of work done in a hurry - and I feel slimed that I even tried
    to answer him.

    He now looks at what he needs to see of me, instead of the things I 
    actually do, and I despair - at some point I lost a friend;  whenever 
    it was that he could honestly believe these things he has accused of me
    and of the things that I do, of this particular corporate entity of which 
    I am a part.

    I don't want to believe this.  I want to believe that he's just doing
    what he can to defend SVLUG in a battle that doesn't really exist until
    he started drawing lines and making sure there was weaponry visible.  
    That would merely be a guy thing, maybe he'll sort out.  But it's been
    too much.  I am appalled every time I hear any of it any more.  I hate
    myself for enduring it as long as I've done.  I won't accept the
    bullying any more.  My friends wouldn't choose to do this.

    I have only ever wanted the best for people, done my best, and all I 
    ever ask is that people respect that.  Not even me.  Just that. 

    There's a little bit of madness in everyone now and then.  When the 
    gentleman I had come to know returns to sanity, someone is welcome to
    let me know.  What I would say to him whenever I see him next or
    whenever he should next choose to say anything to me, I do not honestly 
    know.   But it might be:  Rick, in the coin of the realm, your account
    is short - you owe me a cheque.

Point 4:
SORRY GUYS

    I regret that I had no time to bake LinuxCookies for the picnic. 
    Being able to safely drive in the morning seemed a safer plan.

    The truth is that it was a fun Picnix, I think one of the best, and
    it appears that my promise to all of you - that if it was ot a good
    LinuxPicnic I would eat my straw hat with ketchup - did not have any
    particular chance to endanger my hat.

    Now I've said my piece and it's way too long, and I could as desperately
    as any of you wish that it didn't need to be said.  So I'm going to go
    back to the bliss of silence for a while.  I'll see you guys at the next 
    SVLUG meeting I manage to make it to.

Heather Stern     . | .                   
  star+sts at:  --->*<---  starshine.org * 408 761 4912 - cell
                  ' | `