TangoGPS font size for speed indicator

[Marcus Bauer]

On Fri, 8 Jan 2010 09:12:45 +0100
Laszlo KREKACS <laszlo.krekacs.list at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 11:31 PM, Marcus Bauer
> <marcus.bauer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 6 Jan 2010 23:36:21 +0200
> > "Risto H. Kurppa" <risto at kurppa.fi> wrote:
> >
> >> The community shall be the judge and point me where did I go wrong.
> >
> > The community did already: Risto Kurppa, you have been sending me
> > your massively abusive emails after the release of 0.9.3. They were
> > so far beyond anything acceptable that I
> >
> >  a) got a lawyer in Helsinki to deal with you and
> >  b) informed the Ubuntu Community Council.
> 
> I think it was nothing else just a desperate try to build a
> community around tangogps

I probably repeat myself: open source / free software is build upon a
meritocracy. The more you contribute, the more influence you do have.
And actually in one way or other it is pretty much everywhere in life
like this. 

If you haven't shown any regular support of a project or group than
common sense should tell you that you wont be accepted as community
manager. Freenode has exactly for that the policy that only people
affiliated with a project can register project channels. And freenode is
the core of many communities.

> as apparently you failed to do it.

Ah, allrighty! It is just that tangoGPS has a community of more than
100.000 users, of more than 25 distributions, of people packaging it,
people twittering about it, people blogging about it, people discussing
it in forums...

The tangoGPS friendservice has been used almost half a million times and
the messaging is frequently used too.

There has been an article on Linux.com about tangoGPS and another one in
the Linux Magazine.

I'd say the tangoGPS community is bigger than the openmoko community :-P
 
Now let's compare that to Risto Kurppa, who wrote in his mail two days
ago: "In co-operation with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation I
started a mailing list to discuss FOSS-GPS related topics to connect
the users & developers:".

This sounds good, no politician could say it any better. But if you
look into the list archive you see that there are three positing in the
last month:

http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss-gps/2009-December/date.html

Not exactly a vibrant community that he has created in over a year. "In
co-operation with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation..." BlaBla.

Talk is cheap. It needs sustained work and commitment to get a community
of the ground.


> Risto was and are a very active mailing list member, had some
> very useful comments here, what I think many users
> appreciated.

Which is no excuse for misbehaviour.

> I do believe there was some small misunderstanding in
> your email exchanges.

Certainly not. The Ubuntu Community Council didn't take it lightly
either.

> As for the lawyer part, Im really sorry, you needed hire a lawyer
> in a foreign country. I hope you didnt spent to much money on
> it and also I hope you enjoyed the trip to Helsinki.
> 
> However I usually dont hire any lawyers, if I receive some spams
> in my inbox. But everyone are free to do in his/her way.

That's exactly what I do too with spam. However Risto Kurppa didn't
leave me any choice. He set a deadline until which I have to respond to
him or elsewise he would go public with his diffamations. And yet I'd
still drop this kind of email into the spam folder but next day he
showed up on planet ubuntu and at this point the fun ends. That guy
simply didn't stop and that's when I notified the Ubuntu Community
Council and contacted a lawyer -- btw, they have phones in Helsinki
nowadays, no need to go there.

A word about the "usage of lawyers": they are a lot more useful (and
cheaper) for getting legal advice than for sueing somebody. It is a
good idea to go and get early advice with precise questions than to wait
until a situation is out of control. By definition and statistics they
have a success rate of 50:50 when they sue. -- How was that with
throwing a coin?


Marcus