[odf-discuss] Gnome Foundation and ECMA

[Inge Wallin]

On Sunday 04 November 2007 21:11, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> > You have to take into account that whatever he has done to piss people
> > off, he has raised the profile of free software. Whether you are hot or
> > cold I'll swallow you up etc. RMS is an extreme but extremes and
> > conviction often put ideas on the map
>
> Who said anything about him being extreme? I didn't say anything about him
> being extreme. That has nothing to do with why he is a bad marketer, and
> no, he has not particularly raised the profile of free software, other
> people have done the marketing. Almost nobody knows what GNU is or what
> Free Software is, but "everyone" knows what Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice and
> Open Source are. While he was the guy in charge, the profile of FOSS hardly
> grew, but when Linus and Eric Raymond and others took a different track, it
> suddenly grew rapidly. Start with the marketing term open source. The
> single most greatest marketing success for FOSS was convincing Netscape (a
> widely known company at the time) to release the source of their browser as
> open source. This was not accomplished by RMS, but by Raymond. Then there
> is the support of IBM, also not due to RMS, and there is all the work of
> the Mozilla team, also not related to RMS. There are many great marketers
> in FOSS, but RMS is not one of them. Your statement was that his marketing
> was better than his code. This is not true, his marketing was poor and his
> code great.

I think you give Stallman way too little credit here.  The reason FOSS took 
off with Linux is simply that the Linux kernel was the last missing piece in 
the full free system.  All the other pieces were already there, not few of 
them provided by RMS and the FSF. Had not Linus created the kernel at that 
time, we wouldn't be where we are now, but no doubt would somebody else have 
created another kernel not too far after.

	-Inge

> Daniel.

-- 
Inge Wallin               | Thus spake the master programmer:               |
                          |      "After three days without programming,     |
inge at lysator.liu.se       |       life becomes meaningless."                |
                          | Geoffrey James: The Tao of Programming.         |