Feature:Advocacy

So pk has written in with a fairly important piece addressing Advocacy. There are a few folks on mailing lists, usenet and even Slashdot (boy, what a shock) who are making Linux Users look like loons with wonderful suggestions like killing KDE programmers or bombing Redmond. Flame has a place and purpose, but far to often its just a childish weapon. Anyway, pk's piece is something of a reality check and definately worth reading.

So now we've come to this, to being ridiculed in mainstream press as nothing more than a loosely-knit collection of flamers with poor spelling who wouldn't know Godwin's Law if it came up and bit us in the collective asses.

Maybe it's time we should all take another look at the way we're doing advocacy. Advocacy doesn't need to be a complete destruction of all competitors, isn't that what Microsoft is in trouble for right now?

We got to where we are today by having a technically superior product, by making design decisions based on what the best thing to do technically was, not by following emotions or market-share. No one can deny that this has worked, so why not keep it up in other areas?

Before the flames start with people complaining that I'm trying to tell people what to think and say, I'm not. You can surely go ahead with comparing MS to Hitler, to making personal attacks on what other people say instead of disputing them on technical merit, to complaining about misspellings (gee, even the people in alt.flame call it a "spell-lame"), to blathering on about "Is English this guy's first language?" -- isn't that one of our strengths? We're a multinational community that isn't ground to one nationalistic outlook on software and software design. Look at GPG -- if we were nothing but Americans that would not, could not have been written. People in other countries have a lot to say as well, and immediately ripping into them for an imperfect grasp of the nuances of English grammar (which, face it, very few native speakers truly understand anyways) just goes to show everyone else that the vocal portion of the community is more interested in outward appearances than technical merit.

Maybe what I'm trying to say here is that we all need to collectively chill out. I've been guilty of the things I'm talking about here as well, but I think it is time that we all grow up, before we degenerate even further into a Usenet with slightly more technical knowledge. Usenet is trying to crawl out of the muck (It's time for October), so maybe we can prevent ourselves from falling in.

Now, on to everybody's apparent favorite target, Microsoft. A couple simple items first off:

A) Microsoft is lying to the government, and

B) Microsoft's business practices violate current US anti-trust laws.

The government doesn't like either of these things, especially A). It is only a simple matter of time until the feds put their foot down and start delivering really bad mojo to MS. We didn't get where we are now by rushing to judgment, by hurrying everything along without thinking it through, so why the calls to hurry the lawsuit along? We, as a community, have had nothing but patience, and now isn't the time to give that up. By taking the time to make the best decisions we have an excellent kernel, a lot of excellent open software, and much easier jobs. A war against MS won unfairly isn't good enough.

Perhaps we should also take a look at why we hate Microsoft. MS is just a business, doing what businesses do, albeit a bit more unfairly. I think high-stakes business that gets into the realm of anti-trust laws is a bit difficult to fathom, and I'd be willing to wager that most of us disliked MS long before there was any question of them doing illegal product tying, or trying to force Netscape out of the market, or anything else. I dislike MS because their software makes my job much more difficult, and wastes my time. Businesses are making decisions based on marketing instead of technical merit, and then blame us when things go wrong, as we warned them they would (but they, of course, just wrote off our warnings as coming from a "Unix bigot", or someone "afraid of progress[sic]"). MS has forced people to become "certified" (that's another rant) simply in order to be considered for many jobs out there now. While some would argue that any job that would worry about something like that isn't one worth working for, it's still an unacceptable state of affairs. In reality, as I'm sure all of us know, all this certification says is that "I have spent US$3000 and sat through a bunch of classes", when anyone with even six months of experience actually USING a Un*x system can have comparable skill without having set foot inside a single comp sci class.

Things need to change. I'm not sure how to help change them, but it feels like they are changing already. Linux (and more importantly, the entire open source concept) being mentioned in high level magazines read by your PHB's PHB. Sooner or later, the Big Boss will come down and start asking the head of IS some of the questions posed in these magazines.

If things are changing right now, I think continuing with our current methods of advocacy will end up doing nothing other than shooting us in the foot. Maybe there are some people out there who are opposed to World Domination, but I think there are a lot more of us who just want to be able to use good software and get paid for it, and have a good operating system to use at home.

Brian J. Pardy

(Bits and pieces of this were I'm sure stolen from the comments of many other Slashdot posters, my sincere apologies for not crediting you. If I used your comments, mail me and I'll credit you before putting this up on my page.)