Re: Bug#294491: RFA: povray -- Persistence of vision raytracer

[Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 14:16:54 +0100, Jeroen van Wolffelaar
<jeroen@wolffelaar.nl> wrote:
> Is there any reason to outright insult random software developers here
> on a public mailinglist, where insults are offtopic anyway?  (Hint: no).
> Please refrain from doing so, not only is it against list policy,
> unneeded, and annoying, it might also hurt cooperation between
> prospective Debian povray-maintainer(s) and the povray-team, which so
> far hasn't been extremely succesful anyway.
> 
> I'm puzzled how to mix your statements in [1] into this, is this "part
> of the game"?

Sorry; yes my um, tone was due in large part of annoyance at Debian's
treatment on povray groups, but I agree, it is not productive.

The crux is that the state of the (non-free) Debian povray package has
resulted in general badmouthing of Debian on povray lists.

Povray is maybe an interesting case for non-free:

  1) They're in non-free because they aren't under a free-software license.

  2) Acording to their FAQ, they'd actually rather _like_ to be
     free-software, but large quantities of their source-base were
     developed before they had any such concept, and contributor is so
     muddled that they couldn't easily just relicense everything.

  3) There's a suggestion that they may try to change their license to
     something free after the next big rewrite, planned for the vague
     medium-term future.

So even if povray isn't really "part of Debian", good treatment of the
non-free povray package might contribute to it eventually becoming so.

-Miles

p.s.
  To clarify my position on "rudeness":

  My main beef is with people that respond to otherwise technical
  discussions or queries by being snarky, arrogant, intentionally vague,
  and generally rude in response.  E.g., if person A says "use mail program
  BLAH", and the response from B is "only a moron would use BLAH!".  This
  sort of reply is pretty common, insinuating that A is wrong, but not
  really saying _why_ (if it did, at least that'd be useful!); I think such
  responses are very harmful because they discourage people like A from
  participating in technical discussions without adding anything.

  If person C then responds to B "you're an unhelpful jerk", well maybe
  that's ultimately less productive than calmly ignoring B -- but it's far
  more useful than B's response, because it hopefully at least discourages
  B from using such harmful and useless responses in the future, and
  demonstrates to A that not everybody is against him.

  I don't think it's possible or even desirable to remove _all_ "rudeness"
  and um, loose language from mailing lists, because people have their off
  days, perceive language differently, and sometimes frankly people have it
  coming.

  You may now respond to this message with "You're a jerk!"

-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.