Re: Developer Interest: joseph cheek (fwd)

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

On Sun, 4 Jul 1999, Jason Pincin wrote:

> My email on the developers I'm interested in is forthcoming.
> 
> The IRC meet will have to be Tues, and you'll have my mail before that.
> 
> As far as Mr. Cheek, I'll be blatantly honest:  I don't care to work with
> him at all.  I had a phone conversation with him, several email exchanges,
> I tried letting him know what was going on and insisted that we
> collaborate from the beginning, and he would have none of it.  I believe
> his interests are more commercial than I care for.  As far as making both

I don't think I've talked to him as much as you, but so far I wouldn't
categorize him too commercially.  I do however feel that he's in it
partially for money.  I don't have a problem with that one bit.  I am a
quite a bit put off by his earlier unwillingness to work with us though.  
One might say that if he really wanted to help the community, that was his
chance to work together with us.  Now after the announcement, he's running
scared because he knows that we're going to get a lot of momentum with
this announcement... Not to mention scared when he saw our sponsors.

We're doing a lot of things right, and he knows he can't compete.

> sites better... it doesn't make sense... it'll just hinder the progress
> towards one unified knowledge and information repository if we start
> building up two different ones.  And his site hasn't impressed me at all.

I agree with both those statements.

> As far as commercial contacts, he has them because he's the only one
> claiming to be a LinuxKB that has put any amount of work into it.  As soon
> as our site goes live and as soon as we bring interested developers on
> board, and begin to offer this much improved service, the community will
> be behind us.  And for the most part, the Dists are behind whatever the
> community is.

> So I agree on discussing how we will reply to him via IRC, but know my
> feelings ahead of time :).

Basically, I think we should say something to the effect of:

At this time we don't think a colaborative effort would be in our or the
Linux community's best interest.  Your site as it currently stands is
anti-thetical to our goals of an open and non-commercial knowledge
repository for Linux.

-Aaron