Courtesy in the Tech World

For a while, I have been trying to get into chatting on IRC. Let’s just say it’s not working too well so far. My main problem with it is that you can literally have a chat room with 100 people in it, and NO ONE will be chatting. What the hell is the point in this?

Anyway, so last night I went into the #freebsd room on the irc.freenode.net server. I asked a question “Is anyone in here familiar using snort?” I got a response “I prefer to use a tissue.” OK, funny enough. But I wanted to assure them that I actually had a question. So I said “No, seriously, I am trying to educate myself on security tools. Should I be starting with tcpdump?” Then, the conversation proceeded to play off of the “dump” part of my question. I never did receive a response, not even a “I think you’re asking that question in the wrong room.”

Why are people in the tech community so often hesitant to be helpful? I find this lack of cooperation to be extremely frustrating. I believe it is also quite harmful to the community.

• Because is all the geeks reveal their secrets then no-one would want to pay them lots of $$$ or its just snobby elitism. I have noticed this recently since joining the Linux community. The more complex the topic/technology the more cryptic the answer or the complete lack of an answer.

  Go read the man pages…
  Go read the RFC…
  Go read the list serv…

  Where windows admins will happily share their info. The code may be open source but the knowlege is not.