Softpanorama: Bad linux advocacy FAQ | Linux Today

Softpanorama: Bad linux advocacy FAQ

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Jul 3, 2000

[ Thanks to Nobody for this link.
]

“…the movement is still in its early stages (and not last
days, as some predict) and it suffers from some “childish
diseases”. One of them is bad advocacy.
The term “bad Linux
advocacy” or Raymondism was introduced in my first First Monday
paper to differentiate a credible OSS advocacy from the popular
brand of naive on the border of blind fold Linux chauvinism (“Linux
uber alles”). The main problem with Raymondism is that with the
loss of credibility comes a betrayal of trust to the intelligent
readership.”

“What ESR and Co failed to realize is that people who are
developing and using Solaris, Novell and Microsoft products are
also professionals and many of them are of a caliber far superior
to the author of low to middle-range open source products like
EMACS editor macros, a mail utility, and like ;-). For any
intelligent professional an open demonstration of arrogance
naturally creates a strong negative reaction, a backlash that is
damaging to the movement credibility and future. The same problems
exist with primitive anti Microsoft rhetoric like ERS’s…”

“Even Linux Torvalds proved to be not immune to this decease.
Some of his technical judgments are very suspect. It’s enough to
read attentively several of his interviews to understand that he
started making predictions and evaluate things about which he
actually has very little real knowledge due to the specifics of his
career and the best he can do is to make an educated guess. As
Charles Hannan, a developer of an alternative operating system was
quoted in Ottawa Citizen artilce “All in all that IPO money did to
some Linux developers was make them incredibly arrogant.”

Complete
Story

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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