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Barrabas (22)
Working with NCommander is certainly a challenge.
After agreeing to reimburse me for costs of the project, NCommander now wants to only pay for certain things.
Perhaps others in the community could speak to him? Given that he took the project against my wishes and agreed to reimburse me, I'd like him to keep his part of the bargain.
Is this behaviour truly representative of the our community? It would never even *occur* to me to do this. I suppose that makes me an entirely different type of person - and for that I am glad.
The excerpt from IRC:
23:47 NCommander: Pay me back for startup costs?
23:48 Barrabas, agreed.
23:48 Barrabas, prefer check, or paypal
23:48 NCommander: Check is good. I'll E-mail you my address.
Here is MY E-mail request:
Michael:
Please reimburse me for SoylentNews expenses by sending a check:
[my address]
You'll find a complete accounting of expenses on the wiki:
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/index.php/Expenses
I'd like to be free and clear of the project ASAP, so if you could drop a check in the mail tomorrow or the next day I'd appreciate it. I'm sure you can get a letter from Panama to the US with no trouble. Please let me know when it's posted so I know to look for it.
The package from NY is being returned, but hasn't arrived. When it does, I'll contact you to find out how you'd like to proceed.
Here's his response
I physically don't have checks to send as of right now until I return to the continental US which won't be for another week. With the exception of PayPal or perhaps Western Union, the only other method of money transfer I can do right now is a wire transfer.
We need to split out some of the costs; some of the initial linode charges were on my card and some of these charges look off. Can you provide the receipts so I can get an accurate total of what went
where? I also need the reciepts for handling the accounting side of the business.In addition, there's a lot here that needs to be sorted before I'm comfortable with writing a check. First off, I'm hesistant to pay for things we won't use. The linode annual subscriptions are split on your Linode account, and won't be using more than one Linode 1024. We need to talk to linode, see if they're willing to offer credit and get that transfered to my linode account which can be used to pay for nodes we are using. (as of right now, that's two Linode 2048s, and a 1024 for misc servers. I expect another 2048, and likely upgrading the existing nodes).
Here's what I'm willing to pay as is:
* Domain registration costs ( $220.76 + any fees to transfer to a new register; I don't have a problem with gadhi itself, so if we can send them a email asking for the domains to be moved to a new account, we can call this good.)
* March payment for the production + dev linode + my personal node which are on the 'NCommander' linode account
** When you changed the autobilling information, my personal node got charged against your card
** 2x Linode 2048s, 2x Linode 1024s + backup services for 3 of those boxes
** Total of $145.00, I have the receipt for this one
* The virtual phone number (I'm not even sure what this is, but I'm not going to dispute $14.83)Undisputed amount of right now: $379
My biggest issue is I'm hesitant to pay for things we either didn't use, or won't use.
* Linode 1024 annual payments ( $662.22 )
** As I said, these are simply too small to be useful for anything except misc services. We're already migrated everything to a single node for email, IRC, and LDAP. Once I confirm with robind, nothing from these boxes are used at all.
** I will cover this if we can get linode to cancel the linodes, and convert the unused credit applied to my linode account. If that proves impossible, we'll discuss other options.
** The costs for backup service look wrong, can you please check it (I'd expect all three number to be the same)? Same deal as above* BlueHost ($178.20)
** Honestly, this was paid for before I was even involved in SN (the wiki was already up at this point), and I'm not sure how we ran up a bill *this* high for one month of service. We never used it for SN except as organization for altslashdot, and it was moved as soon as practical. Furthermore, it was clear even before golive that bluehost wouldn't meet our needs very early in the bringup process.To be discussed totals: ( $840 + backup)
As for the Pimsleur Spanish + audio player, its a separate matter from the SN expenses; it was a gift, and I've never been conformable that it was hosted as an expense for the project. Given how things have played out, I'm willing to re-coop this if they're not returnable, but its a separate matter from the SN business.
Gift expenses: $421.14
As a final point, as a contingent of recomp of costs, I would like an agreement that you will make no claim as to the name SoylentNews, the site, basically everything related to SN transfers to me, with no further claims or liabities from yourself, and such. Basically, any costs or profits from the site stay with me (or whatever business that gets setup), the name and domains belongs to me. If we need formal wording for this, I'll get a lawyer involved.
Michael
So far as agreements, yes, he can keep the name and everything else. I actually *keep* my agreements, but it seems like I'll have to put pressure on NCommander to keep his.
(He also agreed to 1) Back my management decisions, and 2) promote my vision of the site when I made him head of dev. Those didn't last long either.)
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @06:11AM
Another messy divorce
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @09:32AM
Agreed, they're both being a bunch of whiny bitches.
(Score: 2, Informative) by bryan on Monday March 10 2014, @08:30AM
Linode is very good at honoring their pro-rated prices. For example, you can order a Linode today (the 10th of March) and it will be pro-rated to 2/3 of the normal price of a month. After a few days, you could then cancel said Linode and they would refund any unused days back to you.
You only pay for what you use.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bucc5062 on Monday March 10 2014, @12:48PM
John,
In fairness, you over reach your own comments.
So now it does not look so amicable eh?
Reading through that exchange, I somewhat agree that this has a tinge of petty and vindictive behavior. You essentially walked away (according to you own words), but now it seems with a string attached. The details I don't give a shit about, but so far your character went from strong leader, to bruised ego, to bitchy ex-wife with the intent to tear down what you can't have.
Is that how you want to be seen?
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quadrox on Monday March 10 2014, @01:29PM
John, first of all you have my sincere thanks for getting this site started.
Unfortunately it appears to me that you had an idea of making this site "your" thing from the beginning, instead of focusing on a true community based approach. I foresaw trouble immediately when I noticed that part. And while I do not doubt that there was a need for strong leadership, it truly does look like you took things a bit too personal and took too much ownership in what should have been a community effort.
I believe there were mistakes made from both you and NCommander - not out of bad faith, but simply because you both had fundamentally different perspectives on what this site should be. I wish you could have stayed part of the project instead of walking off completely.
When it comes to the expenses, I am not sure what to think. On the one hand it seems fair to get reimbursed for all your expenses in exchange for a total handover (I'm strongly leaning in this direction), on the other hand YOU chose to spend some of that money in ways that not necessarily everyone agreed on, so it was your risk to take. I can understand why you want it all back now, but it definitely also looks a bit funny from the other side.
In any case, as I have stated before I would be happy to chip in with my money, both to help resolve this dispute but also to keep the site running.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @02:04PM
In the big message dump [soylentnews.org], was I the only one who had this comment from John jump out at me?
That is a very Stalin-esque style of management.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TK on Monday March 10 2014, @01:36PM
John,
I think you may be applying subtext to this conversation that isn't there. A semi-objective reading of NCommander's email boils down to (for me):
*I am unable to write and mail a check at the moment, due to traveling on business, what other payment methods are you willing to use?
*Before I write a check, I want to make sure I understand the full charges
*Can we talk to Linode about applying the credit for unused servers to my account?
*The hosting bill seems high, what's up with that?
*I don't feel comfortable paying for a gift that was purchased before I was a part of the project, but I still will recoup the cost if it's too much trouble
None of that sounds unreasonable. Please, take a step back, have a mug of beer or tea (whichever is your preference), and slow down. You've still got a claim to the site name, so you still hold a decent portion of the cards here. If you want, you can ask for the remainder of the disputed moneys to be paid as the cost of the name.
There's no need to be too hasty and wreck the site over a few hundred dollars. I know there's a lot of personal feelings and bruised egos on both sides of this, but you can be the better man.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Monday March 10 2014, @02:53PM
well put.
the fact that this is being held at the top of the front page is apalling.
any more of this internal bitch-fest soiling this site and i'm out.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by TK on Monday March 10 2014, @04:21PM
I agree with you that this back and forth resembles a bitch-fest. I do suppose it beats the likely alternative: hidden infighting that results in the site being replaced with a DNS redirect to goat.se or worse.
That being said, I'm sure a less-intense public showing could have happened if the heads involved were a little cooler, but if that were the case, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with.
I still have hope for the site, the more passive users (myself included) just need to ignore the drama and wait for all this to blow over.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum