Preaching to the choir

Preaching to the choir

"Given how familiar you are with free software, I'm surprised you were so unaware of the mission of the FSF that you would post something like this. It is not necessarily bad that your goals are not the same as the FSF's, but you should not expect that it will work towards your goals when they are in opposition to its."

I am pretty familliar with where the FSF stands, and how they feel about anything that doesn't adhere to their own strict view of the world. The issue here is that 99% of the consumers and business decision makers out there don't know this, and for them, it's all open source. First of all we are discussing something as exciting as "Software Licensing" - yawn - secondly, the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software is about as clear and important to people as the different streams of belief in the Greek Orthodox Church.

When the FSF raises it's shrill voice, and proclaims everybody but their own followers as wrong and evil, they harm not only their own cause, but also through extension the whole of the open source environment. As always, when you have a very vocal radicalised minority, they only serve to polarise views and preclude any possibility of compromise. Extremeism, whatever shape it takes, is simply not a good thing.

I remember working on arranging a screening of RevolutionOS when I was working (as an open source consultant) for a large blue chip consulting firm - an awereness building session for all the consultants that had little or no exposure to open source. I watched the movie with my manager and my team - we all saw it for the first time - and about half-way through we all decided it would do more harm then good. The majority of the film is good stuff, and narrates the rise and rise of open source in a really clear and positive way. Everytime the FSF gets involved in the film though, their radicalised, polarised views simply tear down the rest. Too many cringing moments involving RMS. Not too long after, I started thinking if there really was a solid future pushing what amounts to an ideology into business IT.

I deploy and use hardware and software on the basis of architectural decisions, functionality, and technical and business merit, not on the basis of the license it ships with. Any enterprise architect that does different is simply no good. If my functional and technical requirements can be served with open source software, then so much the better. If they can't, then tough. My job, at the end of the day, is to design and build systems that work, not to push an ideology.

If the badvista website would have been a balanced and open discission on the strenghts and weaknesses of the Vista OS, great. It could have even made a bit of a difference. But it isn't and in my opinion in its current form it does more harm then good.