“I was talking to a colleague recently who wanted to know what
it’s like to write about Linux. He’d read discussions on a few
Linux sites and come across one where a writer had gotten himself
fairly mauled for drawing the wrong conclusion and getting linked
by the wrong site for his troubles.”
“‘I don’t know,’ my colleague said, ‘but you guys are sorta out
there. No one else cares about stuff like this and you guys are all
like ‘GPL this’ and ‘Microsoft sucks that’ and you all just rip on
anybody who doesn’t see it that way. No one takes you guys
seriously.'”
“My colleague caught me on a bad day. I’d just read the public
fileting of another writer who hadn’t taken the proper tone of
advocacy while addressing an issue in the Linux world, and I was
coming to the conclusion, on that day, that if writing involves
taking a few knocks from the occasional churl over violent
disagreements, writing about Linux involves taking a few knives in
the back from people you agree with because you didn’t agree hard
enough.”
“And let’s face it, there are certain mixes of issues and
personalities that guarantee an explosive reponse, and it’s because
of the occasional outburst over a hot topic (like whether Richard
Stallman is in the pay of COMINTERN or the notion that Linux might
actually not ever rule the desktop because the desktop as we know
it is teetering on obsolescence) that there’s a perception, right
or wrong, of a ‘Linux Orthodoxy,’ and a cottage industry in the
occasional kvetching article about how ill-tempered and hostile
‘hard core Linux people’ are and how we’ll never get anywhere if we
don’t be more nice to each other.”