list wars --- a plea for flexibility

Honorable BIM list members,

I hereby formally withdraw my seconding of the "Seoul" for this month.
I had erroneously assumed that my posting had made that clear.
As required by the rules, I also individually name Hubert Feyrer and
 declare him to be both a BIM list subscriber and a BSD person.
He asks me to withdraw this month's nomination of "Seoul" restaurant in
 his name.
Because of technical problems, Hubert couldn't post in person.

My mail seems to have set fire to some powder that has been lying
 around for a while. I didn't intend to start a flamewar.
But now that it has broken out, I want to add my humble opinions.

I highly value the effort Julian has been and is investing into BIM
 and the Stammtisch. This made me keep silent until now about a few
 things I consider to be counterproductive.

A little bit of structure is very useful, but we should be careful not
to fall into the trap of overregulation and micromanagement.

I personally had hoped that BIM Stammtisch would be more like a
Kirchentag than like a Kardinalsfachtagung.
After all, we want to generate more interest in BSD, don't we?
BSD is an important part of my life, but I'm no pimplefaced geek
 anymore, I'm a social being.
I happen to prefer the BSD community over other communities because I
 met many people who are open-minded, don't proselytize and don't think
 everybody not in the same church has to be evil or stupid.
And I would prefer that our reputation and the image that we project
 towards the world reflect that attitude.
I caught myself wondering if I'm enough of a "BSD person" to be
eligible. After all, I've only been using NetBSD since 1996, only on
5 platforms, I tried to help newbies on IRC, helped with translations
and found and sometimes corrected a few bugs, but I never did anything
significant like kernel work.

Groveling around the BIM webpages, I noticed that I began feeling
 aggressive... I searched for information and had to wade through
 long and repetitive tirades about idiots wasting Julian's precious
 time. I don't know how much precious time was invested into writing
 these texts, e.g. http://berklix.org/robot/diy.html... but I got a
 distinct feeling that I was being treated like a hopeless idiot and
 that *my* time was being wasted.
Less patient people than myself might even feel insulted by some
 passages.
The problem may exist, but I doubt that such an approach will help it.

About the "Nazi attitude" thing. I probably wouldn't have said that,
 "anal retentive control freak attitude" is probably what Daniel intended
 to say.
This being said, "attitude" != "conviction".
Or is a "cavalier attitude" towards "random bf/gf/spouses" a sign of
 special chivalry?
And please let's limit the discussion to the body of messages, not the
 often randomly generated signatures... or we might as well start arguing
 about message ids or subliminal messages in pgp sig blocks.

Still I hope that, after the thunderstorm will be over, the air will be
 clear and we won't end up with two understaffed groups.
This would especially be in the interest of people who don't live in
 Munich and have a limited budget of time and money.

Cheers, Bernhard Riedel.

--
까마귀 날자 배 더러진다.