Re: of product promotion and consumer representation

[Paul Crowley <paul@hedonism.demon.co.uk>]

"Eric M. Bennett" <ericb@pobox.com> writes:
> Before we consider that, we should try not responding to him.  I 
> personally started filtering all Lewis's messages (and even some 
> replies to his messages, ie email that contains "Lewis Mettler 
> wrote:") into my trash mailbox several days ago.

I have been doing much the same for some time, though I skip the
followups by hand.  There isn't much of am-info left after doing it,
and what there is seems to have a hard time holding together a
coherent discussion in the presence of this loud distraction.

> The only person who was forcibly removed from this list was Brett, 
> because he took almost every thread and tried to turn it into an 
> anti-GPL discussion even if nobody else brought it up.

Both cases are very similar.  Brett sometimes posted useful, on-topic
stuff, and had he been able to control his monomania he would have
been a bonus to the list; in some ways, it's a loss for us that we had
to get rid of him.  I think the same is true of Lewis, and if we boot
him from the list then we will in some ways be the poorer for it, but
if (as I suspect) he proves unable to control his monomania then I
don't see any better choice.

I mean yes, obviously people should learn to sit on their hands in
both cases, but I understand why it's difficult (so difficult that
repeated promises to do so often amount to nothing) and in the end I
side with the clueful even when their efforts to reason with the
clueless are wasted.  I think this forum could be a useful part of the 
process by which the Microsoft Problem is solved, and if that means
losing people from the list who make useful discussion impossible then 
it's worth doing.

I'd also like to put in my usual plea at this point that we continue
to be polite to Simon Cooke, who is AFAICT the most rational and
reasonable apologist Microsoft have ever had, and by that token is
about the most useful person we could have on this mailing list.
-- 
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