Tuesday, January 26, 2010

a rant about ranting

Disclaimer: this post is totally my own opinion and does not reflect anything from SourceForge at all. that's why it's here on this blog.

I'm angry and want to shoot my mouth off - perfect opportunity for a long-lost blog.

We - i.e., SourceForge are getting some crap for blocking sanctioned countries from our site. That's fine - I'm actually ticked off about it too. And many people out there are making sound and solid comments about the action - not just the ones defending SourceForge; there are some good solid critical comments too.

But then you have people who say something like this:

Sourceforge, you suck! You suck so badly, I’ll hereby guarantee you that I’ll not only recommend *anybody* stay the heck away from you scumbags, I’ll actively let everybody know that you’re the scum of the earth. Shame on you! Shame!


With love from pyalot. Well pyalot, since we're all good to judge and criticize each other, let's get started ...

So you are Florian Bösch. Okay Florian, let's see here ... you've worked at Systor(?), Accenture, and DWS. Systor doesn't seem too keen on open-source?, nor does DWS. Ah, looks like Accenture has some good open source work; but what's this?! It's right alongside Microsoft and Oracle solutions?! OMFG! You are the scum of the earth for working with them! GRARRR!

Or, if I take an extra minute, I find you're actually a stand-up guy and developer and a good contributor to open-source!

Couple lessons here:


  1. we're not anonymous on the internet anymore; I found all of this info on Florian starting from his sf.net user page

  2. when we only look at a single facet of any news story or party, we get a very distorted view



I actually sympathize with Florian's sentiments - blocking access from countries goes against the FLOSS ideal. But at the end of the day, SourceForge is a US company under US law. And if we're not law experts we should probably speak our opinion quietly or not at all.