By Emmett Plant
Editor, LinuxToday
This afternoon at The Bazaar, I had the opportunity to sit in on
a panel hosted by Robin ‘roblimo’ Miller from Andover. The panel was called ‘The
Open Source Community vs. The Mainstream Media’ and brought in
guests from the community like Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond.
The topic was an interesting one and inspired conversation and
debate well beyond the time limit imposed by the conference
schedule. Since Linux and the Open Source community have become
big news in the online community and the stock market, the
mainstream media has been chomping at the bit to provide their
audience with an encapsulated view of the community.
Unfortunately, the concepts of Open Source and Free Software are
not served well by today’s ‘sound bite’ media and this presents
challenges to the community at large.
How do we remain true to our goals and inform people at the same
time? This tends to be a problem on a number of different
levels.
First of all, the hacker community is not known for its
communications skills and we need to provide the community with
something to help them deal with the media. Some attempts at this
have already been implemented, such as the Linux Advocacy
HOWTO.
Second, community members share the core beliefs but argue
ferociously about details and minutiae. The online arguments
between Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond serve as an example of these
public disagreements. As one of the panel attendees pointed out: in
a proprietary environment, if we have a disagreement, we would go
to a separate office, close the door and have it out. The open
nature of the community doesn’t lend itself to private
discussion.
One of the most interesting questions pointed at the audience
was ‘What do we, as a community, want from the mainstream media?’
The answer came back solid as brick: We want the mainstream media
to put in a fair share of research into the community and how it
works and we want to deal with educated individuals. Unfortunately,
this rarely happens and we need to act as diplomats and treat
journalists with respect instead of contempt.
One example was cited of the behaviour we don’t need to see:
When one open source programmer was being interviewed by the press,
they learned that the reporter was using Microsoft Word and
terminated the interview immediately.
The topic of being misquoted for the sake of an article was also
discussed. I was quick to point out that being misquoted isn’t just
a problem for the Open Source community. It happens all the time to
people all over the world. We need to do what we can to keep things
straight and realize that our words will be twisted to
meet the needs of reporters who will not provide adequate research
and show education. This is an unfortunate truth, but like everyone
else, we need to do the best we can and keep tabs on the
journalists that misquote us, and more importantly, keep tabs on
the reliable journalists that will not misquote us.
Being an open community has its obvious advantages when it comes
to providing the world with fantastic software and ideology, but
another downside is that everyone on the planet has an equal
opportunity to join the community. In other words, we don’t have
the ability to provide reporters and journalists with the slick
public relations effort that the mainstream media is used to. If a
reporter calls IBM, they will be speaking to someone who makes
their living making IBM look good in the news. If a reporter calls
some open source programmer who lives in a cave and has an acerbic
attitude towards the media, they will end up with an article that
has an unfavorable view towards the community.
In the end, efforts will be made to continue educating the
community on the proper channels and methods to work with the
mainstream media. With a little luck and patience, talented
reporters and journalists will meet us half way.