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.
More importantly, there is 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.
We are a community of not just coders, but localizers, artists, writers, marketers, conference volunteers, web designers, legal experts, photographers, experience and interface designers, and users who file bugs, make suggestions of provide feedback. This is the community that accomplishes and supports the work on the software we use and love.
We are seeing 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. We are 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. 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.
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 of "community" insists that their way is the One True Way, and we should all just shut up, learn the catechism, and do their bidding.
Our community is founded on reputation, we value people based on their contributions: this is the "rough meritocracy" within which we operate. When the imposters of true community engage in defamation, invasions of personal privacy, taking mailing list disagreements into real life by contacting people's employers, they create a chilling effect—people fear to express themselves as themselves, and reputation is lost.
These people are the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists". They are disrupting and dividing our community with their demands that we do things the way they say, and their tactics of anonymous comment-bombing, mailing list trolling and defaming members of the community.
We say enough is enough. We are putting our collective feet down as far as strident demands from complete non-participants in the community go. We are saying "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.
The Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists have nothing to offer the community but their propaganda, their dogma, and their misplaced sense of entitlement. We need to reject those who demand that we all sign up for "Freedom the Way We Tell You To" and we need to make it clear to them that they need to either actually start participating in a meaningful way or simply stop "advocating" at us.
Plain old "freedom" is good enough for us.
