[WBEL-devel] Open Letter to John Morris, Beau WBEL members, et al.

[donavan nelson]

John,

Your lack of communication regarding whiteboxlinux.net and certain aspects of
WBEL have become disturbing to myself and a number of members of the WBEL
community.  Indirect communication via two proxies is not acceptable.  I've
written you
at least a dozen email (privately) and even a couple via the list in an effort
to draw you out to address some of these issue.  All of my efforts have
yielded exactly one thing from you:  nothing.  I realize you have been very
busy addressing technical issues, doing builds, etc. and I "heard" you have
been under the weather.  But this isn't a reasonable explanation.  It
wouldn't take much to send a quick email addressing your work
load/illness/whatever.  Sitting on your hands waiting the situation out
doesn't look too good when you look from this side of the firewall.

When I first emailed you regarding WBEL (mailed at 11/18/2003 20:38:54 CST
responded to at 11/19/2003 03:08:15 CST), your response was very encouraging.
  You seemed very enthusiastic about WBEL, providing long detailed answers to
_all_ my questions including my bug report.  At that time or very shortly
there after, I suggested to you that this was going to go crazy.  And yet, I don't
think we have even gotten close to critical mass with this project (wait until
after the final release), but I have to wonder if your enthusiasm for WBEL
is still as virulent as it was back in Mid November.

In addition, myself and others in the community have some additional issues. 
These include:

1) Numerous offers from the community offering various things.  To the best of
my knowledge, none of these have been accept, and in many cases not even
acknowledged.

2) Your lack of response to my private emails, particularly regarding wbl.net.

3) Your lack of communication regarding the future of WBEL.  Are you going to
do WBEL update 1 when RH releases the first update for RHEL 3?  What are your
plans when RH releases RHEL 3.x (or RHEL 4)?  We aren't certain if WBEL 3 is
the product and updates for the next few years is it.

4) Who's project is this?  Is this John Morris' WBEL or the communities that you
created?  Right now if you fell ill, got hit by a bus, or just got mad and
quit WBEL, I don't think the community would survive.  I'd like to see some
kind of action that promotes the dissemination of WBEL core knowledge.  Sure,
many of us could reinvent the wheel, but we don't want to.  Several people have
expressed concern to me that one person is maintaining WBEL and that their
companies, thought not scared of using an open source distribution, have
serious concern
about adopting a distribution with a community incapable of maintaining and
continuing the
distribution.

5) Have you provided any member of the community a copy of the key used to
sign the WBEL system?  This entire key issue is also a bigger issue.  What are
you going sign?

6) I was working with a gentleman offering free bandwidth for WBEL if we
joined the websites and put some banner ads promoting his web hosting
company.  He stopped talking (emailing) me.  Since you where CC'd on every
communication between him and myself, did you ask him to stop?  (No, I haven't
asked him, I don't want to put him in the position of having to answer.)

I'm prepared to put into motion a community driven WBEL website.  This would
include most of the features available on the current wbl.net site, plus
several additions:  mainly project collaboration (project management kinda
crap), several projects, journals (or blogs so people have any easy way to
provide quick and timely updates), amongst other.

Some projects I expect to include (or would explore including):
1. x86 wbel core
2. x86 wbel core errata
3. x86 wbel plus pack, gadgets, power pack, office pack, pick a nice name 

4. Items 1-3 for IA64 and AMD64, the community needs a place to
share information for these (sub)projects.

For each project plans include, topical forums, bug tracker, request tracker,
plus other things
useful to a project, documentation tiki, news, howtos, faqs, etc.  All the
stuff integral to a successful project.

I don't know if you have visited the wbl.net recently or not, but you will
notice that I haven't done much work on it.  The reason for this is two fold:
one, lack of direction from you regarding the value in having wbl.net, two,
the CMS (content management system) I started with is lacking some features
(for where I'd like wbl.net to go) and I'm evaluating my options for other
CMS's.  I've put a lot of work into wbl.net as a way of showing my support and
enthusiasm for WBEL.  I keep getting email asking me why it isn't being
updated or actively used by the development team.

If you want wbl.net to exist, grow and become the portal to WBEL, please
acknowledge that and provide direction to the community as such.  If you don't
want wbl.net to exist, give me the word (I'll find another use for the domain
-- probably a test domain).

If wbl.net is wanted and is going to be a success, it needs your blessing,
endorsement, promotion, and participation.  whiteboxlinux.org provides no
method of user interaction, no method for the community to share information
and no way to provide feed back, etc.  Perhaps an
alternative would be to move the community to .org and .org elsewhere (or to a
link off the portal).  I don't have to be in control of the portal or it's
content.  I just want WBEL to succeed, like everyone else.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel and don't plan to.  I want WBEL.

BTW: I only registered whiteboxlinux.com to keep a vulture away from it.  If
we find a need for it in the future, we might consider putting it to use.  One
use might be to promote WBEL something along the lines of an adopters page
(with links to them or something).  whiteboxlinux friendly ISP's come to mind
right off the bat.

Sorry for boring everyone with this long email (that will sent in replies
several times I'm sure).  But I felt this needed to be addressed in the open
and maybe some of you who I've communicated with over the past couple weeks
can chime in with your thoughts.

.dn
--
Donavan Nelson
donavan@whiteboxlinux.net
http://whiteboxlinux.net