Why I didn't blog for so long

so... here's my story/answer to the question that i'm sure at least 2 individuals out of the 6x10^9 people on this planet are wondering about:

WHY DIDN'T AARON BLOG FOR SO LONG?

well.. besides the busyness i eluded to in my last blog entry, there were other issues. not only did i feel rather bad about not being around KDE hackingland as much as i wanted to be, but i had an unthankful run-in with the International Online Stupidity Club.

see, i used to blog @kdedevelopers.org. since i'm ostensibly a KDE hacker and that domain has the letters K, D and E in it that must mean that everything i said there is somehow tied very tightly to KDE. or, if you are a reasonable person, not.

now, i'm quite aware that i'm not one to go quietly into the night. but in the right circumstances, i don't believe that's a bad thing. in the process of open, collaborative, creative design we must encourage and engage in open discourse. politics must be secondary to the pragmatic pursuit of peer review and "heated innovation". seeing as these days we are working a lot outside the boundaries of KDE itself, e.g. with Freedesktop.org (which i'm speaking on @ aKademy, btw!) and GNOME, i believe that our discourse needs to include those broader horizons. (and vice versa, of course)

unfortunately, some people in the GNOME camp were none too happy about a KDE developer waxing poetic, or at least waxing frankly, on interoperability and usability. so much so, in fact, that some KDE people were told at a coordination meeting that they may not be welcome @ GUADAC this year! when this news came back to me, i was stunned. of course, they did go and it was famously successful, but the threat was, to me, quite a blow.

if you don't agree with my ideas, refute them.
if you don't like me, tell me ... tell the world ... spurn me ... whatever

but don't take it out on other people who just happen to be in the same project. don't threaten the increasing cohesiveness of the Free Software desktop. why not just come out and say to my (virtual) face, "Aaron, you're a dick, and here are the facts to support that." why not blog about my blog (aka "engaging in discourse") instead of dropping a ton of bricks of my project-mates?

it made me feel like my words had far too much reach and far more power than i was prepared to accept. (which, even as i write this now, sounds beyond stupid.) it made me feel exposed; that i'd somehow unwittingly (aka stupidly) endangered a process i hold very dear and care about. it also made me feel very angry with certain individuals in our larger Open Source community who seem hell-bent on territorial pissings and fighting irrelevant and non-existent political battles.

it was, in a word, disenchanting.

so. now you all now. and now i'm blogging again on neutral ground, and feeling just fine about the world in general. if anyone has issues with that, let me know. blog about it. call me on the phone. hell, i'll even buy the beer if you want to meet at the pub to duke it out =)