Robert Pogson

Eric S Ramymond and Richard Stallman are still at war, trying to do things their way and claiming their way is the right way to do things in IT:

RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes. While he made consequentialist arguments against closed source (and still does) his rhetoric and his thinking became dominated by terms like “evil”, to the point where he repeatedly alienated potential allies both with his absolutism and his demand that anyone cooperating with him share it.

esr does not seem to see that it is quite possible to both promote good technology, FLOSS, while fighting bad technology, particularly Wintel. We need both approaches in IT. In education, particularly, students and teachers do understand sharing and why it is good and they understand monopoly and why it is evil. The morality of IT certainly matters there. It may well be that many potential allies of FLOSS may not understand good and evil. I suggest they read US DOJ v M$ to understand what evil does in IT, raise costs, stifle creativity, and create vulnerability. I suggest they read about emerging nations advancing rapidly in IT, not because of FLOSS but because there is no monopoly holding them back charging double and triple what software should cost just because monopolies can do that. Monopoly promotes evil in IT. It’s as clear as can be. Evil = harm, restrictions, lack of innovation, malware, slow IT, fragile IT, etc. IT is a matter of morality, not just getting the job done no matter how. Even business can relate to energy consumption, capital costs, forced upgrades, lock-in and poor performance as evil. esr should get over himself and work with RMS to get the job done of freeing IT from monopoly. RMS is not the enemy. Monopoly is and it’s evil.

see Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters..