Zaerc. Your comments are just plain wrong. All of them, in every way.
>> 1.) if it is so trivial, then why haven't we still not recovered after months?
As a background, I had an svn server which was the official LinuxMCE SVN for a long time. But, it was slow and there were some connectivity problems, so Hari and Daniel setup a new SVN server (CharonMedia) for LinuxMCE, and my old one wasn't used anymore. Sometime in August I was testing a way to use UPNP for streaming media and committed some test hacks into my *old* svn server to test a proof of concept. Unbeknownst to me, at some point the svn commits from the *old* server, which I thought wasn't used anymore, got committed into CharonMedia. It *is* very trivial to revert an svn commit. I do it every single day when a programmer commits something that breaks the builder. It takes < 60 seconds. You just do: svn log, note the rev #, and then do an svn revert. No biggie.
I think Thom will confirm that what he and Hari and Daniel have been struggling with for months isn't figuring out how to revert that svn commit. They're sharp guys, they could have reverted it in an instant. Rather the struggle has been trying to setup a build environment and get the 0804 or 0810 release out. In general the guys who are vocal and complain are *not* the ones who do the work. Those of us who do the work, like Daniel, Hari, Thom, myself, etc., know it is a *HUGE* task to get each LinuxMCE release. I worked 7 days a week, 16 hours a day without a single day off, for almost 9 months to get 0710 out, *and* I had a paid, full-time staff working on it the whole time. What's taking Thom, Hari and Daniel so many months is getting the next release out; not reverting an svn commit.
>> 2.) and lose just about all the improvements/fixes that were made over the past 6-12 months.
What improvements did anybody lose? If you lost something it has *nothing* to do with me. Thom never mentioned that you "lost" stuff. You really don't understand the concept of svn. An errant svn commit doesn't make you *lose* anything. That's the whole point of svn. You have a history and can revert any mistakes, and everything is recoverable.
>> 3.) he was building a new commercial product that has little to do with linuxmce in the linuxmce SVN and could have at least done so in a branch.
As I said, I was *NOT* using LinuxMCE's SVN at all. The LinuxMCE SVN is on charon media. I have never committed anything to it. I committed something to my old svn server not knowing it fed into the LinuxMCE SVN server. And, it had nothing to do with the commercial product anyway. Like I said it related to UPNP streaming.
>> If "_who really did the 0710 release_" were actually concerned about linuxmce and this community,they would have helped out instead of leaving us
"Leaving us"
I'm on Thom's, Hari's and Daniel's buddy list on Yahoo IM, and they all have my phone number, and I'm online at least 15 hours/day. Plus I have regular contact with Hari and Daniel. Who left? Further re: "concerned about linuxmce"... Ok, let's compare... 5 years ago I sold a very nice in Miami, moved to Romania, where I lived in a tiny hole in the wall for *years* working 365 days/years on LinuxMCE. Every dime I ever had went into LinuxMCE and paying the team in Romania to keep going on it. For 4 years. Do you realize how big LinuxMCE is, and how much code there is, and how much work went into it? Why would I have done that if I didn't "care"? And what contribution have you made that you feel you can judge me and say I haven't done my fair share to contribute? Remember, it's *free* software. People doing this are volunteers. Every time someone donates their time to work on it, it's a gift. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. And certainly don't say that somebody isn't doing enough to ensure that you have a nice media server that you don't have to pay a dime for.
>> an anonymous announcement for their new product (that was created at our expense).
At your expense? How was it at the expense of anyone in the LMCE community? What you mean by "at our expense" is that up until June, every line of code in LinuxMCE, 5 million lines of it, was written by myself or the full time staff of Pluto. The *only* contribution in 4 years was 60 lines from Tinia. So it was *very* easy for the LinuxMCE community to 'coast' up through 0710 because nobody in the community had to do anything. Pluto paid for the servers, all the developers, everything. And the community got it for free. Which is fine. I don't have a problem with that. But what's so whacky is that all you guys were constantly screaming "death to Pluto". Do you remember what you and Barry wrote in that post? You wrote: "We hope Pluto (ie aaron.b) will just die"... "We'll be much better without them". "Death to Pluto". "Just die"... Now, in this thread you write that you feel Pluto was "leaving us" (literally) because Pluto isn't doing all the work for you anymore and the community is going through a rough patch to take over. Do you realize how absolutely *insane* that position is to call for the death of someone and then cry that he's "leaving you"? Jeez.
>> that 0710 release was delayed almost 6 months (presumably mostly due to fiire's commercial interests)
Again, a totally whacky statement. Fiire was Pluto's *ONLY* paying customer. All the work Pluto did, our sole activity, was to write software which was incorporated into LinuxMCE. There was no diversion of resources for a "commercial" interest; Fiire's interest and LinuxMCE's were the same: a stable 0710. That's what Fiire paid Pluto to do, and put a lot of pressure on us to fix hundreds of bugs and make many, many improvements, all of which made it into 0710. So how on earth do you say "0710 was delayed because of Fiire"? Where on earth does such a ridiculous statement come from? There wouldn't have been an 0710 if it wasn't for Fiire. Fiire is what was driving our work because they paid us a license fee per unit. So, again, going back to that flame post.... LinuxMCE was written completely by Pluto/me. Fiire was Pluto's paying customer. You guys were adamant that Fiire must die. You guys put negative comments *everywhere* in the wiki saying 'death to Fiire', boycott Fiire, etc., because they're "commercial" and trying to build a business by selling LinuxMCE-compatible hardware. But that commercial business is what paid for LinuxMCE's development! Do you realize that if Fiire had been successful there would have been an 0804 release already??!! Do you realize that your "burn Fiire to the ground" comments were really the worst thing you could do for LinuxMCE?
You question how much "concern" I have for LinuxMCE. WTF??? You guys who are so insistent on destroying any commercial company that tries to build a business which can fund LinuxMCE's development hurt LinuxMCE way more than I ever could. You say you're "concerned" about LinuxMCE, but then you go for the jugular and want to shut down everyone who pays to keep LinuxMCE going.
LinuxMCE's saviors and guardian angels, btw, are Hari, Daniel and Thom. Hari somehow managed to get a bunch of kick-ass servers with mega bandwidth to keep things going. I don't even know who's paying for it. Did you thank them btw?
>> these people obviously have no interest in working with us, apart from selling us their products.
For years "those people" have done nothing but work day and night on LinuxMCE and contribute everything to the community. You guys just assume that there's a bunch of fat cats getting rich off the community. You are *SOOOOO* far off you can't imagine it. I know the guys at Fiire. They also gambled everything they had to fund development of LinuxMCE because they couldn't sell hardware unless the software was stable. Nobody was getting rich, or even paying the bills, off Fiire. Every dime went into funding LinuxMCE. A couple guys in Fiire worked without a salary for months to keep things alive. One suffered major health problems as a result of the stress and will never recover. The fact is that when Fiire wanted to sell their products they wanted to do everything open source. But, we couldn't find *any* video drivers that were stable enough for a commercial product. nVidia was the closest, and their drivers crashed all the time and had bad video tearing. ATI, Intel, etc. were much further behind. I personally met with some top execs at nVidia, ATI, and Intel begging for them to put resources into their Linux drivers. But they all said there was no commercial market for it. Yeah, duh, it's because guys like you are so opposed to commercial companies using Linux and proclaim 'death' to any commercial company that tries to build a business around open source. (shoot self in foot)... nVidia, ATI, Intel, etc., have an obligation to their shareholders to only go after commercially viable markets, and all of them said "Linux is just for servers, there's no commercial market for Linux media centers." Only closed platforms, like Broadcom and Sigma, have stable Linux drivers (ie TiVo). Via agreed to develop a rock solid, commercially viable Linux driver and license it to Pluto & Fiire. Fiire went in with the best intentions and started marketing the Fiire stations based on those assurances from Via. As you know, the Via drivers weren't as good as we all expected them to be. So, Fiire bought back lots of Fiire stations from angry customers. Fiire's employees went without pay so the money could go to buying back Fiire stations. *Nobody* was getting rich off Fiire.
That's why I wrote in my posts that if there's a company, like Fiire, that gambles on offering a LinuxMCE media center, rather than taking the safe route with Vista, it's in the LinuxMCE community's best interest to support them, not demand that they stop using LinuxMCE (ie switch to Vista). When Fiire's customer service went to hell, it's much better, imho, to listen to the reason 'why' and offer constructive criticism as opposed to saying "die you bastards and rot in hell". (Oh, and then cry that you've been "left" when you get your wish)
I just wonder if you realize how much these hateful remarks hurt the community? You understand that most of the reason why guys like Thom, Hari, Daniel and me make so many sacrifices to develop open source is for the personal satisfaction, since there's little money to be made. As an extreme analogy to make the point, it's like the people who donate their lives to, for example, Habitat for Hummanty (not that LinuxMCE compares to a home of course). These people volunteer their time and money to build homes because it makes them feel good to do something nice for the community. Imagine if after they spent months building a home to give to an underprivileged family, they hand over the keys to that family, hoping to put a smile on their face, and instead the Dad looks at the house and turns to the volunteers and "you filthy bastards giving me that nasty tile floor! I want Terrazzo damn it. If you cared about me and my comfort you'd have given me Terrazzo! Die and rot in hell!", kicks dirt in the volunteers face and throws the keys at them. How do you think the volunteers feel? Do you think they feel like putting the effort into getting this family Terrazzofloors? Do you think they feel excited about volunteering to build the next house? Bottom line: I think if you showed more appreciation for the people who put in so much effort the community would be a lot better off.
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