An Open Letter to Curt Olson

[SkyBoat]

An Open Letter to Curt Olson, 27 Apr 2016

Hello Curt,

It has been a while since we have talked, but after the situation with your moderators banning itOuchPods and Bomber and Falcon for twenty-four hours, along with the deletion of numerous posts, I believe these actions require a response as the Moderator for the Free Flight forum.

Self-Destructive Behavior

Our response is very simple. You are shooting yourself in the foot and driving very motivated and talented younger FlightGear users into our fold. The lack of tolerance of dissent that led to the formation of the Free Flight, Free Speech forum to begin with is completely self-destructive.
So is your policy of prohibiting cross-posting statements by banned individuals. You come across looking petty and vindictive, especially, since the offending posts have been purged, any new reader to your forum has virtually no way to verify why the individual was banned and has every reason to worry that the same might happen to him or her if some invisible line is crossed.

As such, the longer you maintain this retributive policy based on your (honestly, ridiculous) manifesto of prescribed behavior, you are weakening, not just your forum, but your authority over FlightGear as a whole, encouraging new members to distrust you and look for a more welcoming community.

Free Flight, Free Speech does not edit or delete posts. The one exception is blatantly racist speech. That we do not tolerate, nor should you. We also do not ban members, with that one stated exception.

As such, we issue you, and any other FlightGear Forum member the invitation to join Free Flight, Free Speech and engage us in conversation.

Why No Bans.

Banning a member from the forum works against you in two ways. First, the fact you have a policy for banning establishes an incipient undercurrent of mistrust of the leadership. Or to put it more colloquially, the members feel they are always walking on egg shells for fear of committing an offense and having the moderator pop into the topic put on his “moderator’s hat” as one of your moderators is fond of saying and putting down the hammer on whomever he feels has crossed some line.

Therefore, an individual with the greatest talent who may have the desire to jump in to help FlightGear, to explore change, challenge the prevailing ways of thinking, and advance the flight simulator, will hold back for fear of either being put down or shut down. You end up losing the advantage of that person’s superior contribution before you even know it exists. This state of affairs is indefensible in an organization that claims to be unfailingly Open Source.

Here's the critical question and the litmus test: In the past two years, how many truly new contributors to FlightGear have you welcomed who are under the age of 20? Under the age of 15? Even one?

That leads to the second reason for no bans. Around the world the youth of today are leaps and bounds ahead of where most of our current developers were when they were in their teenage years.

You know very well my argument that the future of FlightGear depends on the inclusion and education of young people, adolescents and young adults in considerable numbers to be trained in every aspect of FlightGear’s simulation model.

What goes along with that, however, is a willingness to allow natural adolescent behavior, with all its naturally rough edges, including language that in our generation, would have been scandalous. Frankly, now, their language habits are significantly different than ours were. Of course, part of their maturing is learning when it is not appropriate to use certain words, and sometimes slipping up on that can be painful, but we have decided at Free Flight, to cut some slack as long as that language is not used in the context of bullying (a known serious issue that cannot be swept under the rug).

The Long View

One of our most important goals, therefore, is to cultivate these younger members to explore every aspect of FlightGear, to work with the planes, the scenery, and eventually the code. That is not to take over the simulator, but to ensure there are a group of people in the next generation, 10 years from now and more, who have both the motivation and the skills to continue its existence and development. They are our best hope.

However, there is another scenario you must take with all seriousness from this moment on. These individuals will come knocking on your door for their opportunity to make FlightGear better, or finding it closed, they will have the skills to design a whole new flight simulator rendering FlightGear totally obsolete, another project that ran its course, atrophied and died because its leadership could not adapt to the rapid changes to the environment around them.

There is nothing to stop the youth in Free Flight who are charging ahead with their unbridled enthusiasm and encouragement in the next decade or so from doing just that. We will not stop them and you cannot.

Where We Stand—Who We Are

We view FlightGear as an Open Source Project. We have carefully examined the licenses of every one of the FGMEMBERS aircraft for its GPL status. There is no reason, someone from your forum cannot download all the FGMEMBERS aircraft, determine which ones are not present in FGADDON and copy them to your list.

TerraGIT also is an Open Source Project designed to improve the landscape deficits of Terrasync, not just because of the deficits, but because of the totally unnecessary delays in improvements to it over a period of years. You may call it a divergent project, if you wish, but you have no one to blame but yourself for sitting on the needed scenery changes for so long.

This is where we, Free Flight, stand with regard to the issue of your most current bans and your forum’s reactions to the publishing of terraGIT. You may communicate with me by responding to my email, but know that I will post your response on Free Flight.

Regards,

DrDavid/SkyBoat, Free Flight Global Moderator

IAHM-COL, Free Flight Administrator, has added his signature to this document.

[Corrected spelling of Curt's last name to: Olson. DrD]

[bomber]

Yep......

Simon (52)..

[jwocky]

Whoa ... Bomber, you're a few months older than me ...

[Octal450]

I may post this on the other forum if things don't improve.

I agree with everything you said, I wish my signature was on that as well.

[legoboyvdlp]

Add it!

[legoboyvdlp]

@it0uchpods, you can add your signature, but they read the forum too. Hooray sent me a message about it.

[SkyBoat]

Hello Everyone--

I received a reply from Curt by email. He specifically stated that he witheld his permission for me to post what he wrote. I decided that as a matter of personal integrity I would honor his denial to publish his comments. It is important in a controversy such as this that I maintain a consistent and honest line of communication, treating him with the respect with which I would want to be treated.

Will he write a post and grant me permission to publish it? I have no idea. But the ball now is clearly in his court.

SkyBoat

[KL-666]

Integrity is way to go SkyBoat. Thumbs up.

Kind regards, Vincent

[Octal450]

@KL-666

+1

[N3266G]

can you ask him why the hell his moderators thought i was an alt for it0uchpods?