Seeking a Stallman for open source

This article is so wrong on so many levels.

Richard Stallman may be obstinate, stubborn and difficult, but neither he nor the FSF have ever been defined by a hatred for Microsoft - the irony, of course, is that was always the special territory of Eric Raymond, the erstwhile spokesman for "open source".

A growing number of spokespeople for "open source" or fauxpen source as Tarus Balog calls it

( http://www.adventuresinoss.com/?p=863 )

seem to have no inkling of the meaning of "open source" or "free software", but like the idea that "open source" might be more pragamatic, (which seems to mean proprietary), and know it gets you access to a community and profits.

Perlow, who this article links to, claims to find Stallman boorish, and accuses him of "ad hominem attacks and fear-mongering" - but there seem to be an awful lot of those directed at Stallman recently.

Or am I being unfair? :-) .

Here's the irony:

No matter how you split hairs, Open Source ends up as little more than a failed and misguided marketing campaign.

It is not surprising that a geek-initiated campaign would focus on geek virtues, but free software in business is not driven by source code availability, it is driven by --

GASP!!!!!!!

freedom.

Free software lets you do a lot of things (and cheaply) that you couldn't as easily do with proprietary software. Hell, the ability to spawn pilot projects without worrying about going through 3 layers of corporate approval on licensing terms, expenditures, etc, is worth its weight in gold.