Back to Normal

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not convinced that Le restaurant public GNU is an excellent idea indeed, in spite of the serious issues that have accompanied its launch.  Many of you have wondered where we have been and why we haven't commented about the numerous news stories describing how badly the launch of Le RPG went, and we would like to explain it to you in detail, but that would fill up this forum with minutia that don't need to be here, and at the GPD we are nothing if not succinct, so we won't take up your time with meaningless chatter.  We did not reply to the the unflattering reports about the launch of Le RPG as they were mostly false, but in the interest of clearing up the record we will respond to some of them here.

• "The lines were so long at Le RPG that many people waited in the street for four days before being admitted.  Some of them were admitted to the restaurant, while others were admitted to the hospital with symptoms of malnutrition or exhaustion."  First of all, the gist of this quote is that the restaurant launch was TOO successful.  Since Le RPG is following the open source model we used donated space for our patron-chefs from various companies, and since we are not making money off this endeavor we did not feel that we could provide any more infrastructure.  The demand far outweighed the supply on opening night, and since then we have used the voluntary donations that patron-chefs have provided to rent larger and more permanent space, and to start compensating our editors for their efforts.  As for the "admitted to the hospital," we did have signs posted warning of the wait time, and several of our patron-chefs spent some of their time informing the people waiting in line that they might suffer from malnutrition if they kept waiting.  We even offered to give them vouchers to keep their places in line if they left to get sustenance or rest in the meantime, but only a few potential patrons agreed to the deal.  We don't think we are at fault in this case, and our lawyers agree with us.
• "There were problems with the ordering system.  When I would ask the waiter for a Sushiburger he responded '404: not found,' and when I asked for a Salad Soup he simply said '503: Service Unavailable.'  I expected my waiter to produce human-readable error pages, not just HTTP error codes."  This one is interesting.  First of all, we don't know who this patron-chef thought was his waiter, since Le RPG doesn't use waiters in the traditional sense.  We suspect that he started talking to an android or perhaps just to a computer terminal.  As for the non-human-readable errors, we suspect that the patron-chef was attempting to access a service that is not intended for human consumption.
• "I didn't know what was going on, and I didn't get any food."  We're sorry that some of our patron-chefs were confused by the open source food process, but Le RPG was founded for the sophisticated eater who knows enough about the kitchen to make his or her own food but prefers to leverage the collective intelligence of others like him or her.  We tried to make it clear that Le RPG was not a traditional restaurant, and we had a bulletin board on the wall where people could submit ideas for improvements or report problems.  We did, unfortunately, have a few patron-chefs who posted rude responses on the board, but our editors silenced them as quickly as possible.  We are working on making a menu that people can read and add to as appropriate, and we believe that it will be much better than the simple command line help currently available.

As you can clearly see, we are on top of all the perceived issues and everything is going just peachy!