It’s interesting how much misleading Lefty’s last blog post is.
After receiving (he claims) interesting mails from Boycott Novell’s folks he suddenly realized that the community is under attack.
I’ve come to realize that our community and the people in it, are under attack. We are being disrupted, we are being defamed, we are being lied to, and, in some instances, we are even having our lives invaded.
The attacks seems to come from:
More importantly, I feel as though I’ve started to see a consistent thread running through these attacks, invasions and disruptions. This attack comes not from Microsoft, but from a parasitical pseudo-”community” that attempts to pretend it’s actually our community.
What I am seeing is people making a pretense of involvement in FLOSS and in our community, people who we don’t actually know, people who never join us at conferences, don’t work in projects, and only participate in mailing lists to instigate flame wars. I am seeing people who seem to be making a sort of religion out of “free software” and issuing their demands to the rest of us to do things their way.
It’s nice to note that a normal Linux user is not and should not be considered part of the community. It’s a parasite. I’m under the doubt he refers to Linux users who don’t agree with him, not really to your average-ubuntu-using mom. Because Moms do cookies !
These are people who will excoriate you as something less than a “true GNU/Linux user” if you should touch a Macintosh or (heaven forbid!) a Windows box. These are folks who will berate you for buying a piece of software or owning an iPod. These are people who will classify you as a “freedom hater” if you express reservations about the GPL v3.
Interesting claim, I do not think he’s a freedom hater, though I begin to have strong reservations on his good faith, at this point. And no, I’m not posting from my iPhone (because it’s not comfortable to do so), I’m posting from a Mac OS. Here’s my current kernel:
tacone-macbook:~ tacone$ uname -a Darwin tacone-macbook.local 9.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.7.0: Tue Mar 31 22:52:17 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.12.14~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
By the way, Linus Torvalds himself is sticking to GPL2 and I don’t see that many people classifying him as a freedom hater. Have I missed something ?
He goes on with the old Mark Fink argument, a guy whom I begin to doubt really exists. Basically an ubuntu-devel thread where he raised the Mono argument censorship on Ubuntu forums issue. There’s really not much to say about it, some people (not just Fink) claims the issue really existed (as a sub-issue of closing/deleting flames of any kind). The laughable thing is Fink’s (ridicule) proposal to make BoycottNovell’s Roy Schestowitz a forum moderator.
I won’t discuss this, but it’s pretty laughable as well the fact that he marks Fink’s as your average quarterly anti-mono guy. Is it too difficult to substantiate shortcomings of the rest of the mono-concerned people ?
Then we see another classic: patents in the kernel.
Scott James Remnant asks “Remco” an intriguing question at one point, and maybe Mr. Schestowitz and Mr. Varghese would like to tackle this, too, sometime: if they’re all so concerned about the presence of patents which Microsoft claims to both hold and actively enforce getting into their free software, why haven’t they started a discussion about removing the Linux kernel from the default Ubuntu install?
What a great idea. Remove the kernel itself. That’s what I call being in touch with reality. I’m sorry he didn’t feel appropriated to include some ‘double click patented’ paragraph in there, it would have been the icing on the cake. Not that the FAT32 driver isn’t being patched, uh… but aren’t the kernel and the Mono stack entirely different things ? No, eh ? ok…
I say enough is enough. We should put our collective feet down as far as strident demands from complete non-participants in the community go. We should say “no” to Faux FLOSS Fundamentalism, and people like Roy Schestowitz, Sam Varghese, “Penguin Pete”, “Jason” of mono-nono, and the like, as well as the assortment of associated and sympathetic trolls who post endless anonymous comments to blog postings they dislike and start up flame wars on development lists.
Yes. Just shut up. Wait, didn’t you write..
As I’ve said, our community thrives on disagreement, and we (mostly) deal with it in healthy ways. We reject uniformity of opinion and we always have. In stark contrast, this pretense “community” insists that their way is the One True Way, and we should all just shut up, learn the catechism, and do their bidding.
Intriguing. Find me a post where someone asks Mono people to shut up. Pretty difficult uh ? I’m waiting for links.
Final thoughts
Nice post. Be sure to print it and conserve it. Be sure to use soft paper.
I’m unsure why the Mono argument is referred to in the post. It very easy to point at BoycottNovell to criticize the whole anti-mono movement. Is less difficult address the concerns in a meaningful way. (made up example)
A: Ehy ! Linq falls out the ECMA specs and it is so great ! That sucks
B: You must be Mark Fink’s friend. Go away troll !
It’s also very easy to forget the awful amount of work done on BoycottNovell on another whole range of issues: OOXML irregularities coverage, SCO case coverage, patent trolls coverage and so on. Easy to forget that BoycottNovell is probably the only site on the net brave enough to mirror the defunct Patent Troll Tracker. And more.
And easy to forget the awful number of attacks and anonymous trolling comments, and IRC trolling it had (and even worse), but of course if you troll BoycottNovell it’s fine, because you’re fighting for the good side. Right (read some of Lefty’s own performance here – assuming it’s really him)?
Still, Roy, Jason, Varghese and alikes should shut up.
Well, welcome to the 21th century and freedom of speech.
Being very active in my native ubuntu community for years, I 100% agree with Lefty.
It seems you didn’t get the point of his post even reading the whole thing, so let me sum up it for you.
The so called community parasites are people who have done absolutely nothing noteworthy in OSS world, nobody knows them, but they are always first to criticize, point out how ubuntu isn’t meeting the true (RMS) OSS ideals and shout loudest how there shouldn’t be an easy way to install proprietary drivers, the “ugly” codecs or that mono must be removed. They are also the ones who, like some crazy fanatics, keep telling everyone how evil MS is and how proprietary software should be avoided at all costs and OSS should be praised. The funny thing is, they have never written anything beyond “hello world” and have no idea about the process of real software development. They are those who stick to linux not because they truely enjoy FOSS, but because they truely HATE MS. There never was and will never be (and can’t be) any healthy discussion with people like that and if I ever release my own linux distro “the parasites” will not be welcomed in any discussions at all.
tomas,
Except *no-one* is doing all those things. The people Lefty listed, are just some people he doesn’t like and grouped together (I was one of them), *maybe* one person is a nutbar – I won’t name names – but at least one of them (me) is not.
See, I have GPL projects, have contributed to other projects, use nVidia drivers myself, answer questions on the forums and IRC, don’t have anything against proprietary software and have a “normal” blog that is just general Ubuntu stuff. Lefty is just plain making junk up.
Lefty just doesn’t like that I called him out about all that sexist nonsense and have a blog that is critical of mono (which has lots of pro- and anti-mono people posting on it, check it out and take time to read through things and see: mono-nono.com)
That’s why it’s so easy for people to jump in and say “Oh yeah I don’t like that kind of person either!” No one does! But that isn’t a real person, that’s some caricature that Lefty created to get his hate on.
But those facts don’t matter to Lefty, because he isn’t interested in honesty or integrity, he’s interested in taking a small issue and blowing it up into something larger than it is, tarring people that disagree with him with it, and pretending like his is some sort of courageous leader for standing up for something.
So think about that. There are people that DO contribute and Lefty knows it and still attacks them. Where does that put Lefty and people who support him 100%?
@Jason
I wasn’t pointing at anyone in particular and didn’t really notice that Lefty was attacking you either. I just know that people like I described do exist in OSS communities (more of them than you could even imagine) and represent the community in a really bad way.
Talking about RMS, I wasn’t in the audience during his presentation, but read the transcript ( http://mjg59.livejournal.com/113408.html ) that was published later and I do agree that RMS talk wasn’t acceptable. Anyway, that’s a different matter.
tomas,
No worries – as you might image it’s a bit of a touchy spot for me, but no biggie!
Thanks for hearing me out on it!