I've been having a sort of a correspondence with a fellow who prefers to remain anonymous, and who seems to feel I'm off the mark here. I'm reproducing it here with his permission. My comments are bolded.
Some of us DONT [sic] have Stockholme [sic] Sydrome [sic]. At one time in my life I was forced to run Microsoft Products, Windows 98 and Internet Explorer. This was during high school under a school board who had special deals with Microsoft to exclude everything non-microsoft.
[I don't know what you're referring to—or trying to, anyway—here. I have never been held hostage for an extended length of time by Microsoft. I did work at Apple for a decade, so if I were inclined to be sympathetic, you'd think it'd be in that direction. On the other hand, I've said several times that Apple is so devoted to being closed and proprietary that they make Microsoft look like "The Summer of Code".]
If someone tried to murder you for the last 10 years and then stopped, and tried to be your friend you would be highly skeptical too. Especially when they are trying to murder some of your friends while trying to be nice to you.
[If someone from Microsoft is trying to murder you and your friends, then you should call the authorities. Either law enforcement or mental health, your call.]
Microsoft only contributed GPL code because they had to. They were going to be called out for violating the GPL and spun it into a PR boost.
[I don't believe why they contributed the code is really an issue. There's nothing in the GPL that requires a contributor to be "pure of heart". Why are you making "special case" litmus tests for one, specific company...? (By the way, that's called a "rhetorical question": you supply the answer yourself a little further down...)]
The code they contributed may even be removed because it doesn't meet kernel coding standards and Microsoft hasn't really done much about it.
{{citation-needed}}
I never said don't use mono.
[Yeah, you did.]
I suggest against it because its [sic] risky.
[See? You did it again!]
If Microsoft gave away the standard it would be perfect but Microsoft won't because they want to use it as a weapon.
[It seems that Microsoft has given the bulk of it away, as an ECMA standard, so there's no patent threat inherent in those portions. Can we agree on that much?]
If it was made by IBM or Sun I would probably be using it myself.
[Now, this is really interesting. So, you admit that it's got nothing to do with any technical merits, and if "it was made by IBM or Sun", the potential patent threat would be precisely identical (and let's not even get into the fact that Sun is now Oracle, hm?). So, all that's left here is knee-jerk hatred of Microsoft. Precisely the sort of hatred that Linus, quite correctly, called "a sickness". Do you also wish that I'd die in a fire...? Just wonderin'...]
I don't have cable tv, I hate commercials and tv makes people stupid. I steal movies.
[Do you, now? So, other people's copyrights don't, apparently, mean jack to you. So, why should anyone pay a bit of attention to what the GPL demands? If you don't need to respect copyright, why does anyone else?]
my cell phone is powered by linux and isn't locked.
[It's chock-full of DRM and proprietary code, pal. Might even play WMA files. I'd shoot it now.]
i don't own a stand alone dvd player, the movies I do buy I rip into free formats and stream over my network. I don't listen to mp3 files, i rip all my cds into ogg vorbis format or I download rips done in flac format and convert to ogg.
[That's nice. Is there something that weighs less than a couple of pounds that you can play them on...? You must have stock in a hard disk company or something...]
the game console I do own is a gp2x, a linux powered handheld console. whenever I purchase technology I do research to see if it'll be compatible with free software. I guess you're [sic] comback [sic] fails.
[Au contraire, mon frère: I only thought you were a hypocrite; now, I know you're a thief as well.]
I have switched from Ubuntu to Fedora/KDE. I don't install OS's where I have to remove most of the apps because I don't want M$ technology.
["Most of the apps"...? You mean like F-Stop and Tomboy and nothing else...? Clearly your math skills are as good as your writing abilities: last time I checked, Ubuntu installed more than three applications. In any case, you're free to switch, no one's trying to make you use Ubuntu or Mono or anything that you don't like (or can't steal). Why are you unable to allow people the same freedom you enjoy?]
You need to stop predending [sic] you're trying to help the movement when all you do is attack people good people doing great things. You attacked Richard Stallman for making fun of religion.
[First, I didn't "attack" Mr. Stallman at all. I commented, negatively, on a particularly poor "joke" he made wherein he suggested that members of the "Church of EMACS" had a "holy duty" to unilaterally take it upon themselves to "relieve" "EMACS virgins"—women who had never used EMACS—of this virginity. Where I was brought up, I was taught to say, "May I?" first.
[If my expressing dismay at the notions that "EMACS virgins are women who have never used EMACS" and that members of the "Church of EMACS" have "a holy duty to relieve them of their viriginity" is an "attack" in your eyes, then you're simultaneously incredibly insensitive (to what women in the—soi-disant—"free" software community have to put up with on an ongoing basis) and incredibly thin-skinned (on Stallman's behalf). That's just weird, Brandon. You need to think on that.
[I commented in passing that I thought mockery of religion had no place in a keynote at a technical conference, either, but that was clearly a secondary concern. Sadly, it was the only concern to which Stallman responded. The words "woman" or "women" appear nowhere at all in either of his responses to me. Weird.]
Why aren't you attacking the pope for being sexist. [sic]
[Well, a) I'm not Catholic, so my opinion won't mean much to the Pope; and b) I'm concerned about the sexism in the open source software community, not in the Catholic Church, because it's both depriving the community of a ton of talented people and dissuading those people from wanting to work with us. And where did you get the idea that you get to set my priorities...?]
You attacked Shuttleworth for one sentence taken way out of context.
[No, I didn't. I didn't attack Shuttleworth at all. I felt he made three, not one, very unfortunate sexist statements. The first, "when I say 'release', I'm not talking about the 'happy ending'" is just a gratuitous hooker joke, and appears three minutes into the talk. It set the tone for the second ("easy enough for your mom or your grandmom"—i.e. "women tend to be the most clueless of n00bs"—followed by the third, the now-much-discussed "we" developers—i.e. male heterosexual guys—"won't have so much trouble explaining to girls"—not "women"—"what we do". This does several things: it says that women are something other than "we", and that they have a hard time understanding what "we" guys, as developers, do. All of which is clearly sexist horsecrap. Again, that's not an attack on Mark: it's calling out some exceedingly thoughtless talk, which should be acknowledged. Mark should apologize to the women in the audience and in the Ubuntu community. Canonical's CTO, Matt Zimmermann, agrees with me. Is he "attacking" his own boss...?]
Your buddies at Microsoft have often made bad statements about mothers and grandmothers in relation to product ease.
[And so? I'm not responsible, nor am I especially interested, in looking after Microsoft's community, any more than I am in looking after the Catholic Church. You seem to be having a lot of trouble staying on the topic of discrimination against women in the open source software community. Does the subject make you uncomfortable...?]
You even said yourself that YOU had to break out of that mould, that you're guilty of doing the same thing. Why aren't we writing 6 page blogs about how you are sexist because at one time you were guilty of doing exactly the same thing. [sic]
[I suspect it's because of the statement I made immediately following that admission, which you seem to have conveniently ignored: when I catch myself doing it, or someone else does, I apologize. I acknowledge that it was inappropriate.
[Sadly, neither Stallman nor Shuttleworth have, so far, been able to do any of those things. A fish rots from the head down: if our "leaders" can't do better, what hope is there for fixing the situation where one-eighteenth of the number of women working in proprietary software development are working in (soi-disant) "free" and open source development?]
I'll listen to Richard Stallman over some hack who has to grasp at straws to find bad things to smear them over.
[How have I "smeared" Stallman? He said what he said. I reported it accurately, and I was far from the only one to do so. Have Celeste Lyn Paul, Stormy Peters, Chani Armitage, Matthew Garrett, Matt Zimmerman, André Klapper, Sandy Armstrong and all the others who were both present and that keynote and also complained about it likewise "smeared" Stallman?
You don't think we should be free to express our unhappiness and dismay? Evidently Stallman agrees with you: when asked at Software "Freedom" Day about his GCDS keynote, he replied that, "The person who brought that up seems to be a troll-like enemy of the free software movement."
[So, people who want to improve things for women are "enemies of the free software community". Good to know. Evidently, nothing Stallman does may be criticized, either in his own eyes or those of of his minions.]
You're no different than conspiracy theorists that take single sentances out of context from government documents and try to use that to justify their belief of a "new world order".
[Please feel free to supply the "context" which you feel these statements were "taken out of" which somehow makes them not sexist. Take your time. You know where to write me.]
