Firstly, let me apologize if this comes out-of-thread in $MUA. I'm not subscribed to -project, and am only reading off the archives after checking out the bitchfight in #d-d. ;) Thus, please CC: me on replies. Anyway. I was an OPN staff member for 3-4 months (I honestly can't remember exactly how long), and left to join a disgruntled group of ex-OPN staffers that would later make up OFTC. I was with OFTC for about 8 months, before its core committee asked me to leave (but more on that later). Indeed, I'm as much a "founding member" as David "cdlu" Graham, and David "ElectricElf" Harris. I think that a move to OFTC would be somewhat counterproductive to Debian. Many people go around screaming "OPN iz da k4b4l d00d!!". And they're correct, it is. ElectricElf's assertions that lilo once threatened to shut down the network are entirely correct; I've seen the log (a tarball of a couple of damaging logs was distributed as a "new members' pack", back in the day). As someone (whom I have forgotten, apologies if it was you) said: "OPN: We redefine Open. Come check us out!". However, that doesn't mean OFTC is any better. If you read through David G's email that reads more like a press release than anything, and cut through all the layers of double-talk and manager-speak, you'll see one alarming word: pseudo-democratic. He talks about the staff choosing new people "among themselves". Indeed, read the constitution: 3. Voting 3a. Eligibility and Candidates Voters in elections shall be limited to members of Staff who have served a minimum of three months. Also, a member of Staff may only be eligible if they have received no more than one reprimand from the Ombudsman since the previous election. All voters shall also be candidates. There are no nominations. Any voter may elect any other voter for any position. A voter must also vote themselves into some position. So, basically, instead of having a cabal of 1, OFTC have gone the obviously far superior route of having a cabal of 16. (Interesting aside: I was banned from #moocows, OFTC's "official social channel" for a while, because I kept pointing out this very point whenever an OFTC staffer rambled about OFTC being open and democratic. They claimed it was going to be changed ASAP, but that was some months ago, and cdlu's email doesn't show any sign of wanting to change. Once people get power, sometimes they just don't want to let go). OFTC is also technically immature. I was involved with setting up various scripts et al for the servers at some point, and it's a rather hairy, ad-hoc setup. At the time, basically no-one knew what was going on with any of the servers. Recently, all of OFTC's DNS disappeared, because its major sponsor (terrabox.com) had severe difficulties, and OFTC didn't have an adequate backup DNS system. I won't run away from my point about OFTC being a "cabal", either. One day, as I was lazily poking about on IRC, cdlu /msg'ed me. I knew from the fact that he was even talking to me, instead of talking about me behind my back, that I was sacked, so effective is the communication between cdlu and staff. Core committee/NOC/whatever they're called this week, decided to sack me from my position as a network representative for "misrepresenting the network". How I did this, I'll never know; the only people I told about OFTC were staff/server sponsors I recruited early on. Apparently, I misrepresented it to its staff (!), but I couldn't cut through cdlu's "suit speak" well enough to tell. Interestingly, no-one bothered to even tell me core were considering sacking me, despite everyone having the agenda a couple of days before the meeting, which was about a week before I was told> (Aside 2: I was elected to the position of Network Operator, narrowly missing out on Core Committee/whatever. I later resigned from OFTC during a very difficult period in my life involving three consecutive 145-hour weeks, being dumped by my girlfriend, and other various things. I later came back, and was grudgingly put into the position of Network Representative [i.e. #oftc monkey, and the grudging was on their side, not mine]). Secondly, not everyone in #debian* IRCs on "irc.debian.org", whatever that may point to. A lot of people explicitly connect to an OPN server, because they have a closer server than rotation, they want to use IPv6, or whatever. The conversion won't just be clean-cut (doubly so if you consider DNS TTL issues), it'll be rather hairy. Some people might think I'm bitter because of my bad experiences with OFTC and its "leadership". I'm not really that bitter and hung up about it, but I've seen it from day 1, right up until they launched (it was still basically private when I was sacked, hence my being mystified at the "reason" for my being sacked). OFTC have also painted themselves as being very kind and nice. This is not, however, true. For a while, #iamacow (the disgruntled group of OPN admins before we decided to form a new network) toyed seriously with the idea of making a hostile takeover of OPN; ElectricElf and cdlu also seriously floated the idea of putting pressure on lilo's creditors to force him to repay his loans, hence sinking OPN. Thankfully, neither of those strategies came to the fore. I just think that moving to OFTC would be a bad and very ill-considered move. I think Debian should stay on OPN because OFTC is in so grave a situation. It could even start its own network; I would gladly volunteer to help with that.Those of you who have seen me stoush with Andrew Suffield know that I think he's a complete tool and generally reject out-of-hand anything he has to say because it's bullshit, but (most of) his mail is right wrt OPN and OFTC (for the record, I think the donation requests are both spam and an abuse of network resources). It's also worth noting that I'm not (and never was) a Developer, so feel free to take my opinion with as little a grain of salt as you like. -d (PS: Excuse me if this rambles a bit. I didn't really map it out before I wrote it, as I usually do for longer emails, and I was reading the thread while doing so, so a lot of it is incidental "oh, and while I'm here" comments). -- Daniel Stone <daniel@raging.dropbear.id.au> http://raging.dropbear.id.au KDE Developer <dstone@kde.org> http://www.kde.org Kopete: Multi-protocol IM client http://kopete.kde.org
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