One of your employees are very rude.

[Willie Viljoen]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia.net>
To: "Johnson David" <DavidJohnson at Siemens.com>
Cc: <advocacy at FreeBSD.org>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 9:33 PM
Subject: Re: One of your employees are very rude.


> On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Johnson David wrote:
>
> > It is unfortunate, but there is nothing to do but tolerate it. "FreeBSD"
> > doesn't have the legal authority to dump people off of other private
forums.
> >
> > Just using the name "FreeBSD" isn't good enough. But what if it were?
> > What if Microsoft had the authority to kick you off of Slashdot because
> > you said "Windows sux"?
>
> I think the complaint is not about being rude. But that the person that
> was inconsiderate was known as some developer @freebsd.org.

Sadly, this is again the nature of IRC. There's nothing that prevents
anybody from logging into any IRC server and setting their address to
whatever at freebsd.org in order to make themselves look really special... IRC
servers and nickname registration services never really check the
authenticity of e-mail addresses people provide, for large networks, it
would probably cause serious overhead anyway.

The ones that do, mostly just check to see if the domain they used is there,
or has an MX, some others do a callout to see if the local part is in that
domain, but this is very rare. Even in that case, the person could just type
the address of somebody else @freebsd.org, and it would appear to be valid.
There's no IRC server or registration service in the world that would
actually send an e-mail to confirm this, generally, IRC networks really just
don't care.

Please try to keep in mind that IRC is a public medium, and has recently
been overrun by, well, the public. As an example, we have a network here in
South Africa called ZANet, on this network, exists a channel calling
themselves #FreeBSD. In truth, the only actual FreeBSD users on ZAnet
populate its #linux, because #FreeBSD belongs to a group of people who can
scarcely operate Windows, but saw some cool daemonette pictures from some
BSDcon on some geeky-soft-porn website, and now want to be "cool" too.

If you want to make sure this doesn't happen, stay away from IRC. Ask the
mailing list instead, here, atleast, people try to be reasonably nice. Stay
away from IRC, since the "digital revolution" it's only been good for one
thing -- desperate teenagers seeking dates or social approval or what
ever... If you're older than 15, don't use IRC, you won't find much help, or
interesting conversation for that matter, on an IRC network.

My two cents
Will