Some of you already know this; others may find a few points worth noting. There is a useful purpose for open source advocacy. However, it must be used carefully, because it can divide your audience between people who love your message and people who hate it. While this in itself is true of any message, the shallow sort of love earned by advocacy alone is nothing like the sort of love which comes because of true merit.
Advocacy must be rooted in a deep background of technical merit; in short, it must be the tip of the iceberg. Otherwise, you'll have a three-fold effect, no part of which is desireable:
1. The people who already support open source concepts will gain no further depth from your message. To them, your message is comforting, but a distraction from actual depth, which they'll have to find elsewhere.
2. The people who already have an entrenched opinion against open source development for whatever reason, will _never_ be convinced by advocacy alone. Instead, they'll see advocacy as spin-doctoring, and will spend their energies finding your flaws.
3. The people who are not yet decided will make their decision based on a shallow advocacy. As soon as they encounter more merit supporting closed source, these people will switch allegiance. A great loss, because they'll feel 'cheated,' and be harder to convince back again.
Thus we can see that the most effective free software advocacy is that which carries a great amount of technical depth. For example, while all of the information revealed in the letter from Peruvian legislator was commonly available before Dr. Villanueva wrote the letter, it had not yet all been used so effectively in one place as in that letter. The letter was a well-poised conjunction of technical knowledge, unassuming clarity in language, and a political situation which gave a compelling context of passion to the whole exchange.
We all know that the best advocates of open source development are the people who actually develop quality code. However, there is a place for evangelism which is performed by people who specialize in that task. Thus this brief article, which discusses some of the principles of advocacy of the sort refraining from alienating people.
Advocacy which clearly rests in the language of pragmatic merit, rather than in the language of "good vs. bad" struggles continually to keep the discussion clean, like code should be, so that more information can be passed back and forth. Why the struggle? Because as soon as a conversation resorts to exalting one solution over another, all the strengths of the opposing solution must be ignored because they are seen to represent the opposition. It's hard to harvest from a garden where you've just proclaimed all the fruit bad.
This means that fewer strengths can be incorporated into the overall discussion since they are being isolated into an artificial war against each other. This is a real weakness of 'categorical thinking,' where by categorizing information, we can communicate whole blocks of information very quickly, but we also lose track of some of the valuable information which crosses categories.
For example, by saying that a particular vender's engineers are all stupid (categorical thinking), you leave no room in the conversation for an exception, a person who happens to be brilliant, yet works for that vendor. He is restrained by your comment into a defensive position, kind of like the old question "Have you stopped getting drunk every night?" which is hard to answer if the hearer never gets drunk, but everyone assumes by the question that he does...
That's the kind of question which sounds foolish when there's two people in the conversation, but when there is an audience, it can provoke a mob mentality; best to stay clear of such provocative language, if you intend to learn or teach.
If the conversation stays in the realm of technical merit, based upon very practical standards of feasibility, then people who compete directly are still able to learn from each other in a manner which protects their hidden interests. All that it takes is a keen ear.
Thus, if we are to move forward gracefully, we must become more comfortable speaking in principle-based terminology, resorting to examples only when necessary, and always conditioning them with a preface that shows we mean them as examples of principles, not as reasons to love or hate. Let the love derive from the elegant structure of the OS, not from its advocacy, and the depth will bear fruit.
In this nascent information war, the single greatest strength our opponent carries is to cause us to emulate him. Once we begin selling more than we have produced, we have become the enemy, and someone else will have to take up the standard.
I might be misunderstanding your idea, but isn't this "technical merit" policy similar to telling kids not to steal candy because if they don't, they don't get punished? Maybe it's just that you think that all the advocacy should be directed towards companies, and I don't. But if I understand you correctly, I have two points.
First, you don't take into account that there is something wrong in using proprietary software. Second, even thought appealing to technical merit may be more effective, its effects may be only temporary. When the proprietary competition catches up (and it quite possibly can), the argument loses its power.
Also, what's interesting is the war metaphor you use. To me, it doesn't seem like there is a war going on, or if there is, it's a cold war. Proprietary software cannot kill free software as long as there are people that care about software freedom. Companies can't be enemies of software freedom, but they can be too conservative. They can talk all they want how e.g. GPL is against the American way, but that's just rhetoric. If a system is wrong and fundamentally flawed, empty rhetoric doesn't help one bit.
Maybe we need to convince the people first. The companies will follow soon after. But convincing people is a bigger deal than just mentioning all the technical merits. rms's approach might not be so bad after all, but we need to be a bit less preachy about it. Being right is one thing and being convincing is another.
are you referring to? What I don't understand is why free software must be advocated. Can't software stand on its on? Does it have to come packaged with ideals and certain value systems? I understand the need for GPL/BSD, but I'm not sure about GNU.
Let's imagine that tomorrow all software magically becomes open source, as defined by the GPL and GNU. Now what? How does software get maintained and/or developed? Popular, "sexy," software is simple to find developers for. What about the less popular, corporateware? Stuff that is only used in specifc fields/markets/etc. I think a popular belief is the software will be maintained by corporations paying coders to work on it, and releasing the results under the open source license. I don't buy this argument. When there are two businesses in competition, one of them has a free ride. But, then, would that software even matter if it was free software (and downloadable) anyhow? No sense in preaching to these corporations, which use mostly internally developed software. What about Windows, Lotus, etc. software? Would it be maintained? Who would even dare take the task of maintaining something such as Windows? Does it truely matter that all source code is available? IIRC, RMS had a printer/printer driver that caused him trouble, which is somehow tied to him starting GNU. If RMS had the source for that printer software, would he have been able to fix it anyhow? What about in the future, when software becomes even more tied to remote software? In this case, you can't fix it even when you have the source. One good example is hosting providers. Say there is an exploit in Apache. You have the Apache source, but you are dependent upon your hosting provider to get moving.
Over the years the term "advocacy" seems to have moved from "getting the public aware of what free software is" to mean "pressuring the public into free software." I, personally, do not like this latter stance. I believe that proprietary can live with free software. It has been doing so for a long long time now. Free software has its merits, as does writing proprietary software to put food on the table. Combine the two in a magical way and we have our software utopia, otherwise they must co-exist.
Paying for proprietary software is not intrinsically wrong. If a group of people have put in their time and energy into producing a piece of quality software, is it not only fair that these people are rewarded for their efforts? (Of course, there is also the famous company which reportedly just scobs off existing software, adds some crufty glue, and sells everything at exorbitant prices.)And while the effects of mentioning technical merit may be temporary, the effects of talking about software freedom are practically nonexistent. A non-coder won't find much use for the right to read or modify source code (so in effect "free software" = "freeware"). A coder will already know it's important to be free to write code, and doesn't need much further conversion.
I have seen many people who keep babbling about how free software is `good'. Yet they are really slaves at heart, for they continually depend for others to grant them their software `freedoms'. People who are truly free are those who actively work to improve free software, regardless of whether they talk about freedom or not.
Still, I wonder if talking about technical merits will work well outside the organizational sphere. Organizations often have specific (or semi-specific) IT requirements, and technical discussions do help here. But what about advocacy for using free software for general personal computing, which often has no clear requirements? Are there any useful methods for this? Is this sort of advocacy worth pursuing?
tk:
Paying for proprietary software may not be wrong. But refusing to make copies of it for your friends is wrong, I think. Yes, it may be illegal, but it's hard to see what kind of ethical principle one would violate by making copies of proprietary software. It does not even touch on issues about personal property, because intellectual property is not really property of any kind.
Also, software freedom may not be appreciated simply because people don't know better. If most people really had a good idea about the things what proprietary software companies do - and perhaps more importantly, what they have the potential to do - freedom would be appreciated much more. Currently there isn't much transparency, because the issue of software freedom isn't very popular in the media. I don't think it's impossible to change the situation.
And about the "slaves at heart" thing: if I understand you correctly, it seems that you base your argument on a misunderstanding of freedom. All freedom depends on others. All people can be kidnapped, for example, and that means anyone can lose her or his freedom. But there are mechanisms in place that make this danger in everyday life seem nonexistent: there is for example the police, and also many people watch out for each other, at least in the sense that criminals rarely want to do their crimes on daytime. In the software world, no such mechanisms exist, because people don't know about these issues. And that's something advocacy could change.
One of my peers once told me that, when you tell an average person that Windows is full of security holes, and that he should perhaps switch to some other OS, what he'll do is panic for a while -- then do nothing about the situation. I asked, "Why?" The answer: "Because he feels helpless."
And this is a problem. It doesn't matter whether someone is helpless or not; what matters is that he feels helpless. The only thing he `knows' is that he's being `forced' by the rest of the world to use Windows, and there's nothing he can do about it.
This sort of `helplessness' appears even in free software advocates. (!) I've met many advocate-wannabes who keep wishing that some third party will magically come along, and help create the ultimate free-software-friendly infrastructure / organize the next talk by some open-source luminary / etc. "Why don't you do something yourself?" I asked. And it's always "we're too busy" or "we don't have enough resources" or "we don't have enough manpower". (What sort of advocacy is this?)
And this is what I mean when I say some free software junkies are really "slaves at heart".
Mouthing words of freedom is shallow advocacy at best. To truly achieve a deep effect, one must root out the helplessness that's in people's hearts. And I do believe that dwelling on technical merits (including the technicalities of software development models), and actively getting people to exercise these merits, can help towards this.
First of all, there is the helpless Windows user who wants to switch to a free system but for some reason doesn't do so. This kind of helplessness is the result of having too little (or in some sense, too much) information. The solution is not to talk about technical benefits, but to convince the person that free software is a genuine alternative, that most people can do the things they want to do with a computer completely without proprietary software.
Second, there is the helplessness of the "lazy" developers. I don't understand their attitude. We don't want people to start using free software, if they can't get their work done with it. At some point, we will get to the point where they can. For example, the GNOME and KDE guys are doing good work, and we are getting better all the time.
I am also interested in the motives of the advocacy. Do we want free software to "win" because our life as free software users would become easier in the mainstream (more support from hardware companies etc.)? Or is it because we genuinely believe that proprietary software users suffer because they have to use proprietary software? Or do we have some more abstract goal, like advancing the art of software development?
I believe that when the motives are more clear, the advocacy can be rethought to some extent. Now it seems that most people (maybe including me) are just obsessed with getting free desktop to everyone's desktop without having a clear idea why that goal is worth anything. I'm not saying we don't have reasons. I'm saying that we have lots of reasons, but we don't really agree on which reasons are the most important ones, the ones we should emphasize.
Dalinian:
When Larry Wall finished Perl, the Practical Extraction and Report Language, he was quite familiar with the limitations of advocacy. Since he had created a new language, people expected him to create a new newsgroup to advocate Perl, which he strongly resisted. He did _not_ want Perl to be dragged into an advocacy battle. Here is what he did instead:
He and a handful of friends remained on the various C and Unix admin lists which had inspired him to create Perl. Whenever they saw a question whose solution could be implemented in Perl, they answered it twice. First, they gave the "C" solution, or the "Unix shell" solution. Then they followed it with the much simpler Perl solution.
This had a trickle-up effect. Slowly people came to see that Perl was an amazingly powerful script language which could do a lot of routine tasks elegantly. It was never 'advertised.' Note the letter 'P' stands for 'practical,' which perfectly describes Larry Wall's approach. The rest is history. This is a perfect example of "advocacy resting firmly upon the foundation of technical merit."
It is my observation that TK perfectly understood the original intent of the article, and spoke with clarity about the limitations of advocating without actually enabling. He accurately described the helplessness of the Windows user who hears about security holes in Windows, but lacks an ability to migrate to Linux.
Your solution? "not to talk about technical benefits, but to convince the person that free software is a genuine alternative." TK and I both say "he needs more than that." You are basically proposing we "market, market, market" Linux, without devoting ourselves to the technical merits in a fundamental manner.
Please read again what TK was saying in his closing paragraph: To talk about freedom without actually rooting out the helplessness in the heart, is impotent. You say that we need to "convince the person that free software is a genuine alternative." Well this can best be done by demonstrating technical merit. One fine example is the number of movies being produced on Linux server farms, another example is NASA converting to MySQL, a third example is an entire operating system and thousands of programs available at no cost. This is advocacy rooted in technical merit.
What I mean, is advocacy that speaks for itself, rather than needing a boost from a large marketing department.
The proper way of advocating, is to enable a person WHILE advocating a new solution. Simply advocating a new solution does nothing. Take a look at .NET for an example of advocacy without technical merit. Take a look at 9,000+ 'vaporware' projects at SourceForge, for a similar same weakness within Open Source development. Not all of these will bear fruit.
As for searching motives, that only works if there is a separation between technical merit and advocacy. There is no 'motive' to advocacy when it rests on technical merit. In this form, advocacy is an expression of quality, not a description of it.
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