Open letter to BDFL begging forgiveness.

[The Eternal Squire]

Guido,

It has been two years since PyCon 2005. I know I was a pest during
the conference,
and I am very sorry and regret my actions. At the time I had a 104
degree fever and
pneumonia but I was determined to make the presentation for Honeywell,
even if
it killed me. That had greatly affected my judgement as well at the
time.

I am presently unemployed through no fault of my own, and am now
attempting to
make contributions to Python in my own way while keeping house.
However, I am
beginning to suspect that my status as persona non grata in your eyes
is getting
in the way of other people in this group to accept me.

I really would like to be able to start over here. I am asking for
your forgiveness. I
think had I been in my right mind and healthy I would not have been as
disruptive,
and so if I ever attend another PyCon or other such meeting, I promise
to behave
better.

Sincerely,

Andrew Jonathan Fine

 

[Robert J. Hansen]

ObWarning: I'm not Guido. I'm not even a friend of Guido.

That said, some people think I have a clue about the open-source
community, so maybe this will be worth something. And perhaps it
won't. Take it with a grain of salt.

However, I am beginning to suspect that my status as persona
non grata in your eyes is getting in the way of other people in
this group to accept me.

This may be a hard thing to come to terms with, but you're probably not
important enough to be persona non grata. After all, in order to be
persona non grata you have to be... a persona. No, no, I'm not telling
you that you're not a person. But ask yourself: what have you done for
Python lately? What have you done to warrant being treated like a Kent
Pitman, a James Kanze, a Peter Seibel, an Alex Martelli, just to pick a
few well-known and well-respected names from various programming
languages?

Join mailing lists. Become active in a user's group. Write code. Be
generous with your knowledge. Help newbies. Practice humility.
Always ask yourself, "could I be wrong here?"

Do it for long enough and you'll get a reputation for being a
productive member of the community. And then you'll find that you
never needed 'forgiveness' at all.

 

[Terry Reedy]

I tried to send you a private response but Comcast rejected it ('not a
customer').

tjr

 

[Alex Martelli]

I tried to send you a private response but Comcast rejected it ('not a
customer').

As a Comcast customer, I can confirm that Comcast's email system is a
mess (which is why I use other ways of doing mail -- and don't even get
me started on Comcast's "news", might get my pressure up).


Alex