The CentOS Project seems to be having a problem within some of our community interactive areas that we need to address. As most of you know, the project provides CentOS software free of charge and we also provide community areas like a Wiki, Mailing Lists, IRC Channels and Fora for our users to interact with one another and allow the CentOS community to provide support for each other. There are some companies out there that provide paid CentOS support, but for the most part our users utilize community areas to get support for CentOS. That brings us to our problem ... some members of the community in the areas provided by the CentOS Project are rude to users who are coming in for help. This happens much more often than it should. These complaints are not coming from newbies ... I would expect that to happen. The complaints are coming from people who are very knowledgeable in the open source community and who are involved in other open source projects. Taking that into account, I would like to ask the following from all the people who frequent the CentOS Project's community areas (Wiki, Mailing Lists, Fora, and especially the IRC Channels). I ask that each of you who answer questions there to try and look at it from the other person's point of view and try to be polite. Treat other people like you would like to be treated when interacting with them. There is a time and a place for telling someone what you think of them and their question. Believe me ... I am speaking from much experience here :P … but there is also a time and a place for at least trying to be polite first. Please try to think of the community areas of the CentOS Project as you would think of your front porch, front yard, or the park by your house where you take your children to play. Try to interact with the people as you would if they asked you a question face to face in those settings. Be courteous and use proper etiquette to make your points and if someone will not listen to reason then we (the CentOS Project) have moderators in all the community areas who can try to help in that situation. Sometimes users can be very inconsiderate when asking for help, especially users who are new to open source. They can sometimes seem to project themselves as entitled to support from free community venues in a manner that would lead you to believe they think they are paying a million dollars for a support contract. In those situations, those users do need to understand that there are paid alternatives where they can treat the workers like hired help … but that in a community setting their actions are not considered appropriate. In those situations, please contact the applicable moderators that the CentOS Project has in place and we can help to resolve the issues. I have no problem reminding people that there are paid alternatives to CentOS if they want an service level agreement type of relationship with the vendor ... but lets let that be handled by the people that the Project has in place in our community areas. Lets try to keep the vitriol to a minimum on both sides and work as a group to make the community areas of the CentOS Project as quality a place to be as the software we all love and use.
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