Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxx>: > Learn from history Eric. Unless you are careful to keep your beliefs and > ethics intact you become what you fight, whether its the USA versus the USSR > or free software versus proprietary. Oh, I have learned from history all right. You might recall that I learned enough to do some of the heaviest work at busting us out of our comfortable techie ghetto. A lot of what I learned during that process is that the zealots for a cause are frequently its worst enemies in the end. Yes, hold hard to your ethics -- until the point where your preconceptions prevent you from engaging with *reality*, at which point they've become useless as a guide to achieving your original lofty goals. The reality, in this case, is that ordinary computer users simply don't give a shit about anything but "does it do what I want at a price I'm willing to pay"? If we don't meet those expectations, all the nobility of soul in the universe won't make us any more than another failed cabal of crackpot idealists. On the level of goals, I'm just as hard-core an idealist and visionary as you or anyone else here. But I never forget Santayana's definition of a fanatic: "One who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten his aim". Feeling virtuous and self-justified must not be the end goal, *successfully changing the world for the better* must be. If that means making tactical compromises in the present so we can capture the mass market and wind up in a position to bring overwhelming pressure on hardware manufacturers and stiff-arm would-be IP predators in the future, then hell yes. I'm for it. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
