Atul Chitnis, a friend of mine and somebody who's done a lot for the FOSS movement in India, passed away on June 3, 2013. He was fifty one. Within minutes of news of his passing breaking out on twitter, his many friends were struck dumb. Though many of us knew he was fighting Stage 4 cancer, we'd expected him to hang in there for longer. First there was silence, and then came the eulogies and blog posts, mostly referring to him in positive terms, but Atul was a man who rarely side-stepped controversies when he was alive: He ran head-first into them. He'd had all the diplomacy of a bull in a china shop and I was hoping that his old detractors would exercise better judgement in letting their differences rest, but that was not the case. One of them spewed a horrible burst of venom and vitriol and within a few short minutes, major flame-wars were blazing on twitter and other channels. Atul had been a hard-headed, short-tempered person but even that did not seem to merit such a fusillade of hatred. Where did that come from?Mailing lists are this great resource for people to learn, share, teach and explore. You have a problem? You post a question. You have an experience? You share it. Mailing lists have been around for as long as email has been around (it predates the internet). We now have blogs, micro-blogging engines and a whole gamut of social networking sites, but back then, the mailing lists were everything. Mailing lists are also traditionally archived (not a necessary feature for a mailing list, but they almost always are) and support searching, which ensures that people don't need to ask the same questions all over again. This feature also ensures that everything you say or do on lists get preserved for posterity, dirty laundry and all. It was these very archives that I sought, to find possible explanations to the terrible outburst that sickened practically everybody.The mailing list in question was the linux-india-general list. When I found the archives, I realized that they were far from complete, with several instances of mysteriously deleted, lost or omitted mails. Some of the mails also had originated off the list and had been suddenly pulled onto the list, leaving puzzling questions about what really was exchanged, prior to the discussion landing on the list. What became clear after a quick once-over, was that the lists were a lot dirtier than I'd thought it would be. The exchanges which were actually related to Linux gave fascinating insights about how Linux used to be in earlier times. Linux has matured so much over the years that it's now come to the point where a Linux installation is about as painless as a Windows installation, and things just work, as soon as you are done with the installation. Things were far from being that simple back then, when many of these flame wars actually took place. A slight digression, to describe how things were back then, is quite essential.Today, broadband internet is common-place in India, with most urban Indian homes being connected. Information availability is not a problem anymore. All one needs is a desire to learn and information to help one learn, is just a few clicks (or swipes across a smartphone/tablet!) away. A decade and a half ago, internet was a luxury and connections had to be established using modems, over telephone lines and the charges were fairly high and the speeds were really slow! Only ISPs and research institutions had mail server setups and handed out email accounts. People used POP to download all of their mails from the server and then got off the phone lines, to read the mails at leisure. They'd write replies which were quequed to be sent and would connect to the internet for a brief interval, to dispatch all the replies they'd written. There was no wikipedia! If you had questions to ask on a list, you'd send the mail and keep your fingers crossed, hoping somebody would reply to it, and do the connect-fetchmail-disconnect routine, several times a day, to see if you got any responses. Back then, Linux was truly a wild beast which only the bravest of bravehearts could take on, and these mailing lists were where several questions, trivial for Linuxers today, were first asked and answered.There was nothing which was really too trivial, as everything was really new and shiny. It was both amusing and heartening to see a post by a user who is used to download managers in Windows, enquiring how one can download multiple files without having to type the command for each download. Kiran Jonnalagadda aka jackerhack points out that in Linux, one can invoke the same command many times over by `backgrounding' it, but Atul Chitnis goes a step further. He suggests putting the list of download items in a file and reading out of it! This is something that practically every Linux user, even perhaps a rank newbie of today would know, but it was a big deal back then when people were still discovering Linux. That user must have felt super-happy with the reply and his newfound knowledge! All this is quite warm and fuzzy, so where did the disagreements start? It all started because of numbers.When Atul started his BBS, it got a lot of people interested but that was nothing compared to the number of people who got hooked to Linux. While it's great to have such a large number of interested people, it unfortunately led to several problems. Atul, by virtue of being one of the earliest onto the scene (if not the first), was not only widely respected, but also deemed to be the de-facto leader. This became a pain-point for many people. Much like people had problems referring to Linux as GNU/Linux (You could start here: http://atulchitnis.net/writings/why-linux-and-not-gnulinux/), there were many who believed that they had as much right as Atul Chitnis, to be considered to be the leaders of the community. This often led to some ugly exchanges and lots of washing of dirty linen in public. Here were a bunch of really smart individuals who had the intelligence to make the world a better place for a lot of people,  investing all that intelligence into waging turf wars.  The Linux groups from various cities of India were at loggerheads with each other and bandying names and abuses all around. Those must have been really difficult times and I admire Atul all the more for staying put despite all that and not taking the easy route of cutting himself off from the community. That even after all these years, some of those people have virtually crawled out of the woodwork, only to gloat over his demise is very unfortunate and sad.