discuss: Re: LDP Anniversary]
Subject:
Re: [Fwd: LDP Anniversary]
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
11 May 2002 21:48:20 -0000
Message-Id: <20020511144818.B281@lafn.org>
On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 11:07:37AM +0200, Guylhem P Aznar wrote:
> On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 10:25:46AM -0400, Andy Oram wrote:
> > I have been lurking for some time, but I noticed that you'd
> > like to publish something in celebration of this event.
> > Probably, the O'Reilly Network staff would be willing to put
> > something on the linux site. It would have to have a hook to
> > make it seem like something special is happening; perhaps
> > you could talk about recent improvements and achievements.
> > Anybody up for writing something? I have no time,
> > unfortunately.
>
> If no one else has some time, I can write a short page (using the
> interview and Mark email) to present what was existing in 1992, and what
> is existing now.
Sorry about the mistake of Mark K. Johnson instead of Michael K.
Johnson. I had it right in my history file which is only a few
sentences long plus Matt W. comments.
I think that an honest history is the best. This includes covering
serious problems we had: Our HOWTO coordinator going AWOL and the rise
and fall of Open Source Writers Group OSWG). Some of our author posted
their HOWTOs with OSWG due to the long delays we had at LDP. The most
recent problems include that of the domain name (and being down for a
few days), as well as Red Hat's dropping us. It makes interesting
reading to show how in spite of various setbacks, we were able to
overcome them.
Some organizations sanitize their history and only publish positive
statements. But I think the negative ones are important too. If an
organization does fail, one can examine the negative aspects and
understand why. Some organizations that only put positive statements
in their history, suddenly fail and no one seems to understand why.
With negative statements, it's possible to learn from past mistakes so
as not to repeat them. But even so, it's said that the biggest lesson
of history is that we never learn from the lessons of history but
continue to repeat the same (or related) mistakes over and over.
The license flame wars of 1998 were interesting too. But the license
problems still remain.
David Lawyer
