Free Software Community Folks Are Closer Together Than the Cliques and Opportunists Rallying Around "Open Source" (Openwashing, Marketing, Conniving)
I've been heavily and persistently involved in the Free software community for well over 20 years (at technical capacity and advocacy) and one thing that almost always amazes me is the dedication of the people or the devotion towards the goal, which is Freedom (as in, Software Freedom). This devotion extends to my wife and I. We don't use proprietary things. We also carefully assess the impact of using one piece of software over another and we're not alone. The community is not a corporation. The Free software community does not get to choose who enters (no "job interview"), but it can repel bad actors. And so it does. The same goes for projects.
That's why there were - and still are - stern reflexive reactions to Red Hat/IBM (now Microsoft) projects like systemd. People can rightly smell that the true motivation isn't greater control or choice by the users; it's monolithic and restricted. The aim isn't to foster freedom but actually limit it. Sociopaths in management make the calls (or call the shots); they can also control what the media says, hence or thereby manipulating (e.g. censoring) public discourse.
There are people in the "Open Source" crowd (like Red Hat/IBM) who say they value rather than devalue freedom, but upon closer inspection one can see they don't walk the walk, they just "talk" or merely namedrop words like "free". They'd even promote DRM and TPM while saying how it's "free". In the case of today's FSF, there's no mention of the founder, the office is being shut down, assets are being sold in auctions, documents are belatedly published using Microsoft tools [1, 2, 3], and there seems to be no awareness that C# is Microsoft (or perhaps a lack of awareness of how vicious Microsoft is).
At the end of the day, however, in my personal experience (decades already) those who 'fake' being into Software Freedom lose their status in the community and gradually perish away, just like Bruce Byfield and this other phony that attacks my family [1, 2] (one day he might have to face, in court, the people whom he attacked online for many years).
Generally speaking, freedom-loving geeks learn to reject morbid elements and trolls, who end up expelled, or implicitly ostracised. This is a protection mechanism.
For the record, my laptops run Free software and my main laptop will have an uptime of 1.5 years in two weeks from now. Free software is stable and predictable. Prior to 2010 I occasionally had system crashes due to the GPU driver, which was proprietary.
Never make concessions or agreements with people who threaten to stab people or 'joke' about killing people with an axe. The Free software community is a pacifist one; we do not tolerate violence. █
