A Field Guide to Free Software Supporters

Part of Byfield's conclusion could have also served as a disclaimer for his "seven different types of FOSS supporters".

Quoting:Conclusion

I am tempted to put these types on a scale, with Microsoft Haters on the right, and Activists on the left, with the positions growing increasingly idealistic as you move to the left. However, this scale does not really work, except in the three types of Advocates. It would be misleading, for instance, to say that Open Source Programmers are less idealistic than any other type of advocate; they simply have different ideals. The same is also true of Hardcore Advocates and Activists.

In practice, too, human behavior is not nearly consistent enough for pigeon-holing. While many people fall fairly definitely into one of these camps most of the time, many can probably be classified under different types at different times.

This is arguably the key part of Byfield's disclaimer, and might have more effectively been part of the introduction so that readers can take his opinion(s) "with a grain of salt", i.e., avoiding the very pigeon-holing of human behavior Byfield launches into.

Also, would believe that there is a temporal/situational aspect to Byfield's hard-and-fast FOSS supporter types. As a striking example of this, many FOSS supporters in the past who were so impressed (or borderline-impressed) with Novell and Linspire's FOSS efforts up to November 2006, became quite disenchanted within a relatively short time period afterwards following Microsoft's cloaked anti-FOSS FUD and IP Patent Deals with these two particular companies. This push to the Microsoft-Hating extreme was picked up by SVJN's LW just as on LXer. There are those FOSS-supporting readers of this very thread, who have themselves transformed their FOSS-Supporting Byfield-types either way depending upon recent circumstances(a.k.a., "temptations").