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Re:Your Desktop (Score:3)
by Bowie J. Poag (16898) on Friday February 18, 2000 @08:54PM (#1260938) Homepage

Hi!

Thank you for submitting your various clue-deprived assumptions to the world. I'll now take the time to correct them, and you.

Firstly, the "same damn swirly-theme-with-some-random-set-of-colors-in-som e-boring-pattern motif" apparently is quite popular. To date, we've had well over 30 million hits on the site, not to mention about 300,000 visitors since the project began just over a year ago. Did I mention the 1,200,000 copies of Red Hat 6.0, and 6.1 which ship with a good sized chunk of Propaganda tiles on each? Oh, lest we forget Mandrake..them too by virtue of association. I dont think your view is shared by the populous.

Secondly, my work (and Naru's subsequent work) is not being "forced" on you, or anyone. To my knowledge, no one is being subjected to our collection of free desktop backgrounds against their will. Check with Amnesty International. I'm sure they have a few people looking out for this and other serious civil rights abuses.

Thirdly, and most importantly, you're completely and absolutely wrong in this case:

"No accounting for taste, of course, but I just don't see what the big deal is about Propaganda's stuff that it has to get (likely extraordinary) funding from VA Linux, among other things."

You wanna know how much "extraordinary funding" i've recieved from VA Linux Systems? Zero. Thats right, you read it correctly. Nothing. Zero. $0.00. In British Pounds, that translates to 0.00. In pesos, thats 'cero'. In Lire, thats also 0.00... Infact, if you really want to get down to it, this project cost me about 1000 hours of work, and about $450 out of pocket. Red Hat never paid me a dime..I got an IPO invitation from them, but silly me, I refused to lie on a financial statement with E-Trade in order to get in on it. Damn those morals of mine! What about VA? VA didnt even recognize me when they were handing out IPO invitations.

As you can see, i've made absolutely no money from this project. Guess what that means? That means youre complaining about something youre getting FOR FREE. The whole reason you're getting it for free, because for a long time I liked making people happy by putting whatever talent I had to use for the Linux community. And you, sitting pretty in a position to pass judgement over an entire year's worth of labor, and the sum total of nearly eight hundred images, would like everyone in the world to know that "Its not something to get all worked up about."

Well, thank you for your comment. I hope that you'll continue to take mine, and other's work for granted. Naru's work may not yet be as refined as mine, but thats no reason to afford him any less respect.

In the meantime, you, and other people who find it necessarry to look a gift horse in the mouth can form a line to the left to kiss my ass. Lucky for you, thats also free. You see, its people like you that remind me of why I stopped doing things for other people for free.

Have a GREAT day,


Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org [themes.org])
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