Serious Business

A brief story about OSS foundations, money, and why I hope FreeBSD dies a quick death.

Let me start by saying: every day I have to deal with FreeBSD. Through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, a co-worker has been blinded by the lies of FreeBSD and now swears by its superiority over other operating systems. Thus most of our servers that have been installed by him in recent years run the shit. Since I started this has been the subject of many day-to-day jokes/jabs in our small part of the floor.

Don’t get me wrong here; I know FreeBSD works on servers. I know it works well. However, I think FreeBSD is about as useful on the desktop as any Linux distro is (‘what a POS’). To this end, Gordon (a coworker) decided to surprise me with the following (which I only received after the fact):

Gordon wrote:

Hello FreeBSD Foundation,

I would like to make two donations. One from myself and one from a
co-worker. My donation isn’t a problem. However, the one for my
co-worker might be a problem. The donation from the co-worker has
to appear from him — but I would be paying for it.

(It’s a bit of a practical joke on my part. The coworker doesn’t
much care for FreeBSD. He’s one of those filthy Debian users. Seeing
his name appear as a donor for FreeBSD would result in much comedy at work)

Can this be arranged?

Regards,

-Gordon

Son of a bitch.

This f’n guy. Do you see what this  guy is doing to me? KILLING ME SLOWLY.

_Well_Fucking_Played_Gordon_

So this letter gets sent to deb@freebsdfoundation and board@freebsdfoundation. One would think that Gordon’s going to slay with this one, right? WRONG.

Instead of taking the free money, although slightly underhanded, in pretty good faith / kind gesture, the FreeBSD foundation replies to him with this:

Dear Gordon,

Thank for your interest in making a donation to the foundation. I
understand your intent on playing a practical joke on your co-worker.
We all try to have a good sense of humor here. But, our donors list is
extremely important to us. This is where we have a chance to acknowledge
and show our appreciation to our donors. The names listed there are
FreeBSD’s biggest advocates. And, BTW, we do have a policy that we only
list the name as documented on the check or donation service.

I hope you understand why we can’t support you with your request.
Thank you for your support of FreeBSD.

Sincerely,

Deb Goodkin
Director of Operations
The FreeBSD Foundation

Wut?

Really?

_Really?_

Listen guys. FreeBSD isn’t so hot nowadays. When someone offers you money for your shitty work, take it. Take it and fucking run. Use it to get that stick shoved up your ass surgically removed. What if he was going to donate hundreds of dollars? You wont add 12 letters to a web page because someone might be butthurt if they found out the true story behind it? This is whats wrong with these shitty fucking OSS projects.

For future reference FreeBSD foundation: NO ONE GIVES A FUCK.

Idiots.

Anyway, I will be making a donation to some shitty OSS project other than the FreeBSD project and forwarding the receipt on to Deb in reply to her message in the near future. Thanks for the laughs.

skwisgaar and blitzkrieg

Check out my awesome new cattes! They are great

Yikes. It’s been almost 4 months since my last update; shit has changed. A lot.

Job

Soon after my last post, I took a job with an ISP as a developer in a fault monitoring / tools group. It wasn’t really what I was looking for was looking for when I left my last job, but as I had mentioned back in July, I needed a job. The job really breaks down like this: we are a small “go-to” team for all issues / tasks that come up. Tool development and maintenance / solutions provider / network monitoring / netcool administration / system rollouts and maintenance / firewall administration / network issues (BIG network) / and on top of all that throw in some security issues as well. You name it, we do it, for the most part. It’s pretty brutal day in / day out. This team doubled in size the week I joined if that gives any indication of the workload we’re facing. Thankfully I’m working with guys who I can really respect on a technical level and generally enjoy the team dynamic we have going.

Projects

With the job came the loss of the one thing I really didn’t want to give up: free time. My outside of work activities / energy has been cut to a sliver of what it was 4 months ago and I find myself constantly fighting to squeeze an extra hour out of every day wherever possible. The job has been real rough on all aspects of my life. There’s not a whole lot I can do about it right now, so I’m hoping things get better in this regard, or at the very least I’m trying to learn to unplug from work before I end up in the same state of mind I got into at my last job. At this point I’m not really sure how I feel about all of that though.

Work has somewhat stalled on a lot of the projects I was working on before I started the job. This is really something I’m trying to figure out how to work around. I put a lot of time and effort into a lot of things this past year and I’d really like to have the opportunity to finish / see through to completion at least a few of them. This is currently one of my main driving points and long term goal.

Summer

This whole past summer came and went in flash. It was one disappointment after another it seems. I finally got my teeth fixed by the most incompetent dentist I’ve ever met (I swear he did more harm than good). Only now has it almost come to an end after 3 root canals (they fucked one up), two crowns, and 1 filling. Along with that headache, the only things I hold truly near and dear, my cattes (Pudge and Pipper), both got very sick this summer. My birthday came and went as I worked through it. I finally had to say goodbye to one of my cats, Pudge, in what has to have been the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. It put me in a real bad state of mind for a few weeks. However, life continues on…

The Good

On the plus, I’ve recently become the new owner of two kittens who are adorable. I’ve named them the most metal names I could come up with without offending everyone; Blitzkrieg (Blitz) and Skwisgaar (Skwis). I just signed a lease on a place to live for the next year out in Herndon. It’s a pretty big place to give the cats some room to roam and I’ll have it all to myself which will be nice for a change. I’ve also been doing some really great work on some projects at the office which have made me feel a little better. It’s something right?

Here’s hoping things get better.