[KLUG Members] Re: Are "we" sure that SmoothWall is"good"?????

[Bryan J. Smith]

Adam Williams wrote:
> Of the 9 positive messages, one contained a technical correction
> from someone in the OpenLDAP project.

Which is always welcomed.

> Of the four negative ones: 1 stated I was a "dumba$$" for publishing
> the document as PDF when everything could be done just as well in a
> text file,

We have a guy like that in our local Orlando LUG.  He bashes Adobe, and
bashes me for using PDF, but he loves and praises Postscript(R).  Duh
... who does he think invested, licenses and owns the technology and
trademarks on Postscript?  Adobe is the nicest company of the "big 3"
software firms, although their lawyers get in the way of that on
occassion.

Worse yet, he bashes Adobe about the KIllustrator issue constantly
(which wasn't Adobe's fault), but never talks about Dimitri (which is a
different story).  He's not very good at "picking his battles."  ;->  He
just launches strikes continuously on what everyone else is not talking
about -- hence why he's clueless on Dimitri, but keeps going on about
KIllustrator (which has been settled for months).

> 1 stated that I clearly did not know what I was talking about and
> my presentation will only serve to frustrate and confuse people,

It's not quite complete from what you said in your post.  I _always_
find my presentations always get "reorganized" or "added filler" to tie
different sections together before all is said and done -- because I
think of things when I add comment.

Some people just don't get the WIP (work in progress) concept.  They
usually don't produce much themselves.  ;-P

> and the other two were general one-liner statements about how much
> the presentation sucks.

They want single GUI tool to do it all that not even Microsoft can
produce to do the same.  ;-P

> I find them rather amusing,  but one can see how it might plant the
> seeds for a bitter attitude toward "users."  On the other hand, of
> the nine several heaped on the praise to the point where they could
> be considered hymns to my genius.

Just focus on them.

> It has also resulted in two job offers, and some very appreciative
> developers as they have something to throw back at people with
> silly questions.

There's no such thing as "too much 3rd party documentation" when the
developers are too busy to stop and write it themselves.  I find stuff
via Google all the time -- from people not associated with the projects
themselves.  I pass it on to the project leads, and they usually them
for it (and it gets added to their links).

Besides, so much UNIX software gets used in ways that the developers
never thought it could.

> From what I understand this is a pretty typical "contributor experience".

Yep.

-- Bryan

-- 
Bryan J. Smith, Engineer          mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.       http://www.linux-wlan.org
SmithConcepts, Inc.            http://www.SmithConcepts.com