[sf-lug] Ubuntu release ("back on-list" sub thread)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Kristian Erik Hermansen (kristian.hermansen at gmail.com):

> Rick!  Man I usually stick up for you and I can understand some of
> your frustrations with svlug, but its not nice to bash christian
> einfeldt and the "google employee" on this list.  I have to assume you
> were referring to warren turkal at google.

The Google, Inc. employee, whom I did _not_ identify and will not do so,
first acted within Google to attempt to ensure that SVLUG could not have
any further kernel walkthrough or installfest meetings at Google
buildings, and then more recently sent a series of unauthorised private
mails to SVLUG's site contact at Symantec in Mountain View for general
meetings that seriously endangered the group's ability to hold any
meetings _there_.[1]

The main reasons why this person wasn't banned summarily was that (1)
the latter ploy didn't work, and (2) Daniel Gimpelevich and I both
argued against doing so, on grounds that the action was too hasty and
could backfire.

(The Google person is on record as saying he wants to run a Linux user
group in the South Bay, but that he no longer likes SVLUG.  Do the math.)


Christian Einfeldt's exquisitely useless and demoralising "ungovernable"
comment, at exactly the time when SVLUG's core volunteers were finally 
succeeding in dealing with the group's alcoholic-president nightmare and
getting someone else to take over, was (by contrast) merely extremely
anti-helpful and insensitive rather than the Google guy's outright
passive-aggressive malice -- but _is_ a matter of public record.  I, as
the guy who (among other things) paid a three-year domain renewal to
prevent the prior president from shooting the group in its kneecaps,
_did_ notice, and have rather resented the man going out of his way to
add insult to injury, in that fashion.

He does owe the core volunteers an apology for that, in fact, but I'm
not going to suggest it, as he'd probably screw that up.  Heck, I can't
even reminisce about a long-ago SVLUG "personality" without Christian
plastering the SVLUG Volunteers list with long and irrelevant
come-to-SF-and-help-the-poor-use-their-computers advocacy posts:

http://lists.svlug.org/archives/volunteers/2008q2/001162.html
http://lists.svlug.org/archives/volunteers/2008q2/001163.html
http://lists.svlug.org/archives/volunteers/2008q2/001164.html
http://lists.svlug.org/archives/volunteers/2008q2/001165.html


[1] I might have classified the endangering of SVLUG's meeting
facilities, there, as an unfortunate accident, except that the Google
employee's meddlesome and anti-SVLUG e-mails to SVLUG's Symantec contact
continued even _after_ SVLUG's president telephoned the Google employee
and asked him to stop.  So, no, that was attempted sabotage.