Re: Inappropriate changes to front page text [Was: Re:

On Wednesday 22 December 2004 00:05, Justin Clift wrote:
> People often talk about the "risk of offending someone" but like...
> who's the *someone*?

At least half of the MySQL community is 'offended' by our very existence.
Not to mention our claim to be the 'most advanced open source databse' or our
ACID-compliance stance or....

Should we fold up shop?

As an ordained Baptist Minister, I run into this quite often.  My very
existence offends some; I yet exist.  And have been at least somewhat of a
productive member of the PostgreSQL community.  I tell people that I got my
education in Atlanta Georgia; I also went to school there.  Waking up with
shotgun blast holes in your door, in your walls, and lead in you matress is
not a comforting thing; that did in fact happen to me.  I've seen a few
things.

That is, I guess, the best lesson I ever learned from Usenet and running a
C-New site back in the day; the base credo: 'Not only are there people on
Usenet who disagree with you, there are people on Usenet who would be happy
to kill you for your beliefs, somewhere, regardless of belief.'

Yet I admined a C-New site for several years, participating in news.groups,
news.admin, and reading the occassional alt.flame mass cross-post.  I
certainly have been flamed.  My old pre-google-archive  .sig certainly
stirred up a few back in the day.

In my present job I continue to see many things along these lines, unlike my
previous job, which was with a Baptist radio station/internet site (and yet
provided equipment on which I built and distributed PostgreSQL RPMs for
several years).  Astronomers are an interesting lot; I have seen quite an
interesting cross-section in the last year and a half.

Regardless of what you say, it WILL offend someone.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu