FreeBSD's problems as seen by the BSDForen.de community

[Dominic Fandrey]

Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> writes:
>>>> (I don't even think bsdforen.de is the largest German BSD
>>>> community, but that's a different story).
>>> Even in case it's the second biggest forum, it shouldn't be ignored;
>> I agree completely, it shouldn't be ignored.  (Whether it's
>> the first, second or third biggest forum doesn't matter at
>> all; it can't be easily measured anyway.)
> 
> BSDForen.de is a native-language forum, and I suspect it suffers from
> the same problems as other native-language fora: they become closed
> communities with little or no contact with the parent community, and
> over time they construct their own mythology of how that community
> functions and acts.

Since so many of us are subscribed to these mailing lists, I feel quite
confident about saying that we are neither disconnected nor have created a
mythology.
If you mean by disconnected the people who appear once and ask something that
can be answered by telling them to read a certain chapter in the handbook or
one of the 120 HowTos we have written and collected (I have offered to the
doc-mailing list to translate some to English, but that has been ignored),
then in deed we are guilty - of keeping lots of newbies with trivial questions
from these lists.

> I have seen this before - a complete disconnect between the reality of
> the project and its perception by a native-language user group,
> culminating in one case in a face to face "crisis meeting" between
> members of that community and FreeBSD developers, and in another in a
> flame war over an "open letter" from that user group to the developers.
> Interestingly, both cases involved German-language communities.

The flame-war is occurring here. It didn't happen on our forums. The first
people to reply to the "open letter" did so in a very constructive fashion.
They anticipated that our letter was the result of months long discussion and
only described problems of senior community members, who all are subscribed to
FreeBSD mailing lists.

I personally have been flamed on IRC and received hate-mail, because I openly
opposed translating developer documentation to German, because I think that
such a translation favors a community split.