Joe Terranova

Any decision you take will affect users and colleagues, and we expect you to take those consequences into account when making decisions.

In response to this question. For those not familiar with the issue, here.

To be honest, the associated party’s vision of free speech is skewed. (In America at least), free speech merely shields you from reprisal and censorship from the government, as well as government agencies and organizations; free speech does not cover a) your employer firing you, b) an organization disowning you, c) a newspaper, magazine, or web site censoring or removing your work.

Therefore, I am constantly amazed when people both in and out of the Ubuntu community are surprised that their words have consequences, especially on Planet Ubuntu; Planet Ubuntu is basically a casual press release to the world, and should be treated as such — not in that every post must be directly related to Ubuntu (though I’d appreciate if it was more so some days), but that those that aren’t shouldn’t be offensive. Likely to start a friendly argument? Sure. Controversial? Sure. Repeated posts of an offensive or sexual nature? On your blog, that’s perfectly fine … but if you check off the tag that gets you syndicated on Planet Ubuntu, it’s expected that you act in a way that complies with the letter and spirit of the Code of Conduct.

Don’t be shocked and appalled when you’re asked to obey basic community standards. Likewise, if someone points out that your post is patently offensive, there are a number of different ways to respond.

The correct response:

• apologize?
• provide an explanation
• learn from your mistakes

The incorrect response:

• rant about your free speech rights
• Blaming the person who pointed it out for not being more open-minded
• Leaving all of your attachments to the community in a brash and indignant huff.

Don’t tell people to grow thicker skins. Don’t tell people they should ignore your posts if they’re offensive. We’re a community, we have community standards, and we expect you to follow them.

Update: Thanks for all the comments, but I’ve disabled further commenting to stop this from digressing any further. Let’s focus on more important things.

Presentation went well yesterday.Relevant blog posts from Liz and Jim. Pics from my side are available here. Some of mine:

Overall, I think it went pretty darn well, and it looks like PA Team thought so as well. Overall I’m told they gave out around 100 CDs, and got quite a few sign ups for their installfest on June 2nd.

• I’m trying to organize an Ubucon. First step: figure out where the hell it can be hosted. I’m looking at Central Jersey at the end of July, so I’ll try calling TCNJ tomorrow or early next week. If you know a suitable place, let me know!
• I set up beryl on Christina’s laptop, and finally got KVM working correctly — Ubuntu Forums to the rescue! Apparently it’s an issue with acpi in Windows: this post told me how to disable it, and this post tells how to disable it during the install (I added the latter to the kvm wiki page). Now it works, and runs in real time.
• Which is good, because I’ll be at least showing both briefly at PACS next weekend. I’ll be giving a presentation on (GNU) Linux and Ubuntu, and (hopefully) people from the PA LoCo Team will be there to answer questions and give out CDs.
• Spurred by the Ed Lally’s presentation at April’s CHLUG meeting, I’ve decided to set up Asterisk in my house, and been having some trouble. I first set up Trixbox, which comes with Asterisk and FreePBX, but I wasn’t satisfied with it; it runs on CentOS, it didn’t make it clear how to change a lot of the settings, and I was also having stability issues — memory usage slowly went up, ssh died for no reason, etc. Installing FreePBX and Asterisk on Ubuntu didn’t fare much better; apparently FreePBX basically takes over your system, which is what I was trying to avoid. There’s apparently a deb package from Xorcom according to a wiki page Fabian was working on, but if that doesn’t work I’m going plain Asterisk, which should be a learning experience.
• Also, I crave brains, as Dave pointed out. I’m going to try to get Christina to make a better picture of me soon — preferably one that looks like I’m staring right at you, Dave.

In short, TCF went very well. Pictures are available here (Picasa) and here (F-Spot). Some highlights:

In total, we gave out all 150 printed CDs, and a little over 200 burned ones. I’d say it went pretty well.