While we were hard on the FSF, you have to at least admit. This style of attack marketing that they do, only hurts things so much more than it does help.

1. Their 7 sins sound like mad establishments of half truths.. Which sucks, because it weakens the positions of the real arguments behind the points they brought up… Because those real issues are now casted in the same “crazy light” as their points.

2. The FSF, without question, does this stuff just for the attention. If that was not the case, they’d not do mass-PR press releases to everywhere. The bad thing about this, is it becomes another tail chase session… The OSS community ends up just doing more in-fighting over all of this, and Microsoft and other companies that gain from F/OSS’s loss just sit back and let us fight our selves… They never have to do a thing, we throw all the punches our selves.

3. Their approach clearly does not speak to their target market, again, this reinforces the stereotype that OSS promoters are out of touch, and don’t understand the real world. When we loose that ground, all the positive and great things in the world will never be heard, because it all sound like noise from a bunch of people who don’t understand their needs.

I consider my self a long time Linux promoter, via our shows, and in real life… And at the end of the day, it’s like getting a sucker punch to the gut, I feel like the FSF has pissed away a ton of hard work a lot of us have done to promote open source and Linux…

I don’t say all that to detract from all the fantastic work the FSF has done, I would never intend for my comments to do that. But I think it is totally fair to acknowledge the good work, and criticize the very bad work they do.

-Chris