*BSD News Article 71302


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Look, this is depressing!  I'm outta here, folks!
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 05:57:04 -0700
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <31C6A7A0.7DE14518@FreeBSD.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b4 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386)

I'm going to stop reading USENET again, I think.  It does bad things for
my blood pressure.  Sorry, folks..

It seems like there are a lot of people out there who are just
constitutionally incapable of grasping the concept of "free software"
and what volunteers are really here to do.  I think they expect a lot of
the world in general, perhaps, and see free lunches as a constitutional
right.

These same people also labor under the false impression that they can
buy a CD for anywhere from $18.00 (street price) to $39.95 and be
entitled to eternal unpaid, unthanked technical support for that kind of
money.  Heck, Walnut Creek CDROM *will* do their level best to help you
if you call their tech support hotline or send them email, and they
won't even ask you where you bought the CD (you could be an entire
school sharing a single copy, for all they know) - a better deal is
pretty hard to find.  But even with that, people expect more.  They
expect every volunteer project member to dedicate the same level of
"drop everything and help me now!" support and they expect to get that
support whether they've ask for it with a smile or a snarl.

Anyway, there's been a lot of that kind of whining going on here lately
and it doesn't do good things for my love of humanity to read it, so I'm
going to pull the ejection handle now and sign off of USENET for a month
or six.  It's either this or start flaming people to crisps as my
circuit breakers go, and I don't think that'd be very constructive.
-- 
- Jordan Hubbard
  President, FreeBSD Project