Mailing the story:
Three Feet from Gold: Why ESR is Wrong to Advocate Compromise
Eric Raymond advocates pragmatism and compromise with respect to our dealings with the owners of proprietary multimedia codecs. According to him, we need to ask Apple and others to license their technology so we can hook up iPods to our machines running Linux. That will entice others to start using Linux, or so goes his reasoning. But this reasoning is flawed. First and most importantly, it's flawed because we're so close to the gold, so to speak.