Re: Argh, Stray interrupts 2006

["Dmitri Nikulin" <dnikulin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/4/06, Ben Cadieux <ben.cadieux@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> O_o
>
> You guys sure waste a lot of time on trolls.  Too bad Danial didn't
> post any official title, he's starting to remind me of the Jerry
> Taylor incident.  It's pretty clear this guy is too ignorant to have
> "23 years" of life experience, let alone that much time using unixes.

Let's do detective work!

He seems to have first appeared (at least by Google's omniscient
perception) around about here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/9/20/129

This is a typical "we've broken XYZ so let's start developing hacks"
lkml thread. He participated with less harassment intensity than here,
but a little nonetheless. I think that case was justified.

Shortly after (well ok, three months), he posted here:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2005-12/msg00007.html
This is on a surprisingly similar topic, so I figured it was something
close to his heart. Still no abuse! He might not be a pure troll.

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2005-12/msg00017.html
Arguing with Matt. It happens I suppose. Maybe he does know something,
who knows?

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2005-12/msg00108.html
Now that's insulting.


So his modus operandi is changing. At first he made seemingly
innocuous responses in other threads (there are probably more, that's
the first example I found, and it's a good one) and escalated to
insults as soon as it seemed to him that he could undermine a core
developer. Now he goes out and starts escalating in a fresh thread.

He's a troll, but a devious one, and probably actually knows
something. He *doesn't* know that there is no point in DragonFly
working to be a user-friendly desktop OS now, since such efforts often
get in the way of Real Work like the heroic effort Matt has applied to
the kernel architecture, and so would defeat the point of DragonFly.
We already have DesktopBSD and PC-BSD, and they're comparable to Linux
in overall quality, so what's the problem?

A lot of corporations and zealots won't take up anything with a BSD
license because of the past brain-dead GPL preaching of ESR and RMS,
and no level of awesome installer will change their minds. If people
voluntarily used Linux instead of BSD back when Linux was barely
usable for anything at all
(http://www.spatula.net/proc/linux/index.src), who could reasonably
expect that the situation will reverse now, when Linux has billions of
dollars of momentum towards becoming usable, and BSDs are still
focusing on the much less marketable task of actually working
properly?

Heck, in a perfect world, users wouldn't have been brain-damaged by
Microsoft and Apple and their ideas for how an interface should work,
which is clearly the polar opposite of anything actually usable. Then
BSDs and other real unices would be the natural choice because of
their grand devotion to sanity and maintainability. But because users
expect the same level of brokeness, security holes and frequent
architectural failures of Windows in everything they run these days,
they must turn to Linux distributions to suit their expectations. Put
someone like that in front of a truly stable, logical and secure
operating system and they think it's smoke and mirrors. Bah.

 -- Dmitri Nikulin