Piestar

I am often guilty of over-thinking things, and following the great debates that I do – Liberal vs Conservative, FOSS vs Commercial, Football, Sports, Consoles and even the whole Middle East debacle something – a pattern – has come to my attention.

Behind every side of an argument is a greater truth.  It is rarely, if ever, voiced but everyone knows what their sides truth is, even if they do not even realise there is one.  The reason these arguments never end is because the truths on either side are fundamentally incompatible and once someone becomes ideologically entrenched in a position they will rarely change their mind and do anything to support their truth or discredit their opponents.

The problem with debating with 99% of the Open Source proponents is that the greater truth is that FOSS software is better written, more secure and generally superior to it’s Closed Source competition.  You simply cannot discuss the failings of FOSS in a public setting as saying that FOSS Software has problems runs contrary to the greater truth.

The other side effect of this is that little truths are sacrificed in the name of the big truth.  It is acceptable to be creative with reality, to slander, spread FUD, exaggerate, make ridiculous guesses and conjecture and do pretty much everything short of outright lying to forward this agenda. The ultimate example of this is Slashdot, where they have daily and Microsoft FUD sessions based upon wrong and exaggerated information, such as this.  Anything that points at problems with the Greater Satans of software is leaped upon without even a thought of fact-checking, while anything that runs contrary to their ideology is ‘debunked’ and explained away.

Personally I do not give a toss about the license a piece of software is released under.  I will use the best tool for the job, irrespective of ideological considerations.  Not that they do not matter – I will not use software or a service with an overly onerous EULA, nor will I buy limited use or overly DRM’ed software and games simply out of principle but I do not subscribe to a sides agenda entirely.

Of course the end result of this behaviour, that is the desire to support the cause and discredit the opposition, does massive damage to the same cause they are trying to support.  The only possible way for anything to improve is for it’s problems to be discussed and brought to light.  One of the best examples I have seen on this subject is this article by FOSS legend Eric S Raymond, with the point brought home by his followup The Luxury of Ignorance.

“This rant made it onto all the major open-source news channels, so I was expecting a fair amount of feedback (and maybe pushback). But the volume of community reaction that thundered into my mailbox far surpassed what I had been expecting — and the dominant theme, too, was a bit of a surprise. Not the hundreds of iterations of “Tell it, brother!”, nor the handful of people who excoriated me as an arrogant twerp; those are both normal features of the response when I fire a broadside. No, the really interesting part was how many of the letters said. in effect, “Gee. And all this time I thought it was just me…”"

Basically thousands of people were having the same issues as ESR with CUPS for years yet nobody spoke up* because speaking up goes against the support of the greater truth.

Now ask yourself this – if CUPS was a Microsoft product would so many people let such large issues with it slide for so long?  Or would mocking it be a regular feature on many forums and publications making it painfully obvious to anyone in MS that it needed attention?  And how can it possibly help the FOSS movement if criticism is only ever made of Closed Source software?

* Well a few probably did speak up but were promptly shouted down.