On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 10:01:29PM -0400, Charles M. Hannum wrote:
> On Saturday 02 September 2006 01:38, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> > Unless some kind of
> > significant and very strange effort to deceive bystanders was carried
> > out (e.g. writing letters, bringing them to public gatherings, putting
> > them in addressed envelopes, but secretly never mailing them; 
> 
> Uh, Thor, *what* are you talking about?  What letters?  What public 
> gatherings?  What addressed envelopes?  I never saw any such thing.  Whenever 
> I *asked* Christos about the situation, all I got was "I'm working on it" or 
> some equivalent.

You said something about like that to me at the time -- maybe in Las
Vegas when a few of us were helping you run the NetBSD booth at, hm, was
it LinuxWorld?  I didn't know Christos as well then as I do now, and I
was irritated that something this important would be left to linger, so
when I got home to New York, I asked him why he was letting the issue
slide.  As I recall, he was more than a little miffed by this (as you
had been by what you, in turn, seemed to think was his inaction) and
not much later he actually brought to the regular Thursday evening
New York NetBSD gathering a paper-and-ink letter he was sending you to,
he said, try to get you to add more Board members or otherwise help
resuscitate the corporation.  Subsequently he let folks look over his
shoulder from time to time as he wrote email about it and so forth
but the letter really sticks in my mind.

That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to to trick a bunch of
people whose opinions probably don't matter into thinking he was all
reasonable and nice and that you're a jerk.  If you say you never got
any response from Christos about this stuff, years ago, I think there
is probably a better explanation out there than sneaky evil badness
on anyone's part.  But I was tired of playing go between then and I
am tired of it now, so I just bow out.  Each of you can believe what
you clearly already do about what happened, but I would like to suggest
that it is perhaps not the kindest interpretation of the disagreement
to say that this person committed fraud X or that person tried to be
the dictator of Y, neither of which seems really true to this guy who
happened to be a bystander on some of the occasions in question.

But while we are trying to clear up failures to communicate -- I and
others have been trying to get in touch with you about the status of
your NetBSD login account (not the developer agreement, this was a
reaction, I think, by membership-exec to our reports that we couldn't
get in touch with you) for about eighteen months.  Nobody AFAIK has
received any response to any inquiry on this general subject.  If
somehow we've been failing to get in touch with you through accident
or our own fault, please, could you get back in touch offline (if
you want to say that's the case here, great) and let us know?

People simply not talking to each other is a particularly bad way to
spread bad feeling and achieve bad results.  I only wish I had managed
to be less of a screw-up in my efforts to get people in (or formerly
in) NetBSD to talk to each other in the past.  Sigh.

--
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud