“foobared”, an anonymous WebFoundation employee who was trying out Varnish, showed up on our IRC channel one day. When I pointed out that the information he needed was in the manual pages, he first complained that they were too verbose, then admitted that he hadn't actually read them, before finally complaining that they were too sparse. Meanwhile, his tone grew increasingly nasty. He may or may not be aware of the fact that “foobared”, or more correctly “fubar”, is an acronym for “f––––d up beyond all recognition”. Anyway, here's an annotated log of our conversation.

Ken Gunderson was so saddened by my anger at a person who insisted—without substantiation—that FreeBSD had been “going downhill” for the past ten years and unusable for the last five that he sent him a long sympathy note, which he Cc:ed to me. In you go, Ken. Once again, you can read the raw log or the cleaned-up one.

Louis is a very disturbed person who hangs out on the NTP Pool mailing list. He tried to convince me that the people who were trying to help me on the list were, in fact, abusing me. Moreover, he tried to back his argument with an appeal to authority... the authority, in this case, being his Slashdot karma. You can read a raw log of our conversation, or the more readable de-MIMEd version.

Aryeh Friedman is convinced that Open Source will collapse in the near term unless everybody who uses it is required to donate either money or time to the developers. So convinced, in fact, that he not only bet his company on this “business model”, but hijacked a completely unrelated mailing list thread to request that the FreeBSD project adopt the same model, then admitted that he saw the project as a competitor and was hoping it would ultimately fail.

Mr Friedman is also the originator of the Friedman Gambit. Unfortunately for him, the fall of the USSR proves him wrong.