i very much appreciate it when people such as yourself make comments that bring me back down to earth.

i should point out that my anger - even after three years have passed - is directed quite specifically, and not at "open source" in general. it's very interesting to note someone else's recent diary entry on here about commercial exploitation of open source leads them to encourage others to rethink their relationship and attitude to open source.

perhaps my experiences - which are at the extreme end of "bad" - will encourage people to, i dunno, set up a guild of open source programmers; a trade union; a charter which outlines the expected relationship between programmers and potential employees; even a freemason's lodge - heck, i don't give a monkey's as long as it makes sure people don't end up going through the same shit that i did.

so, without going into too much detail - and answering your question directly at the risk of inciting wrath:

i put three, maybe four intense years of my life into samba, a major project that has won awards and attracted commercial sponsorship from several companies such as SGI, HP, IBM, VALinux, TurboLinux, Linuxcare;

during the dotcom boom, NOT ONE of the linux companies invited me to take part in their IPOs, whilst at the same time, one of those linux companies invited the brother of one of the samba developers to take part in its IPO;

the so-called samba team leaders were ALWAYs jealous and incapable of understanding how much work i did and how far i was pushing the boundaries of interoperability with NT, and they couldn't handle it; now they are running into design difficulties because they were incapable of listening to my advice;

psychological and financial pressures made it very _very_ difficult for me to communicate effectively and also to be able to negotiate properly, to the point where one of the samba team developers not only wouldn't look at any code i wrote but also would rubbish literally _any_ ideas that i had, even if they had successful usage and grounding in other well-known and well-established projects.

basically what happened was a massive failure in communications and relations that would, and i am not joking, have led many people in the same situation to a nervous breakdown.

to cap it all, my employment contract with linuxcare required that they own any intellectual property rights in code that i wrote and ideas that i had (so i made sure i didn't write any new code and i made sure i didn't explore any new ideas in samba) and yet the other samba team members were not bound by the same restrictions.

so i believe i am entitled to be pissed off with open source - or more explicitly, how open source - and myself - has been exploited and violated.

to the extent that if i do develop and release a major project in the future with the potential to be attractive and useful to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, it will be under a license that is otherwise unrestricted except to ban certain companies, such as VA/Linux, HP, Redhat, Caldera etc. from using or distributing it.

such a license would pretty much leave Debian and other truly non-commercially-controlled distributions as the means of distribution.