Ok some clarity from my POV.
there are 3 issues here
1> Dishonesty -
selling/installing PCLinuxOS and the claiming to be able to offer (paid)support.
2 Abuse -
abuse of the forum and irc the community and you. - having claimed they can support the install they hit an issue, lacking any real knowledge they post on the forum (and the complain the responses are too slow and that the person is gone) == nore is the poster willing to learn or put time into learning
3 Reputation Risk
this is te biggest issue, if some one is dishonest to perpetrate no1 then what to say that other actions are not being carried out. we dont want their actions to give PCLinuxOS a bad rep
Over the years we have had a user ( hi "Ri Anne are you still Koul?") who was caught out as to having his own website where he was claiming to have created a live-dvd OS that he called his own and was selling paid support annd claimed it was superior and not in anyway pclinuxos - however when someone managed to get a copy , all it was was a themed PCLinuxOS with an extra few apps (from the repo (infact PASS) when e was caught out red handed he ran.
Another forum user a few years go was asking a lot of remaster questions and dependency questions and was producing a version which quite frankly was broke beyond belief - ( big hi to "justu SA")
Yet another person was found to be selling a tampered PCLinuxOS Remaster on ebay but passing on support to the forum, his tampering was found out and the users advised to reinstall with an "official" iso
We will never be able to stop the above from happening, but what we can do is attempt to minimize the effect they have on our forum and with our community
This is why the call was issued - consider it either a wake up call or a call to (defensive) arms
Its also an attempt to safe guard Texstar's living so that he can continue to offer a great world class operating system if the OS gets a poor rep, Texstar earns less,
If bottom feeders are living off our knowledge that would freely been given - the community suffers due to that one persons dishonesty
All the above happens everywhere within FOSS, we just decided to speak up about it to our wonderful community as there is strength in numbers and we as a community should abhor all that threaten us whether directly or indirectly.
I think this is a bigger threat to us than what microsoft poses
Jase
