Re: [Trisquel-users] Are most of you free software extremists?

[onpon4]

People are fanatical about all kinds of things, and software choice (as in,  
what software is better, e.g. Emacs vs vi, GNOME 3, Unity) is one of them.  
It's not limited to free software at all. Just look at Windows vs OS X, or  
the many video game console wars (currently it's actually sort of a  
legitimate one, the status quo of the PS4 vs the additional restrictions of  
the Xbox One, but usually the fights are over practical differences). The  
only difference here is that the developers of proprietary software aren't  
very public about it (it's the company that's in the public).

Free software does get an additional problem, but it comes from the "open  
source" values, not free software values: people hear that what's great about  
"open source" is everyone can contribute, so they assume that they are  
entitled to make decisions about the software, which just isn't the case. The  
developers deserve freedom to develop the program the way they wish the same  
way the users deserve the freedom to fork the program, use it as-is, modify  
it, etc. But because of this misconception, we have people who feel entitled  
to contribute decisions about the direction software goes being dicks about  
it. Minetest recently went through a spell of this, with a bunch of people  
publicly being childish: blanking their posts with the mods they wrote, or  
publicly saying "I'm sick of Minetest and the core devs and blah blah blah,  
I'm leaving" before actually leaving.