I’ve been catching up with F/OSS news lately, and have been reading several articles, blog posts, and news items. What seems to be the common denominator in the F/OSS community is the level of zealotry and passion that dominates conversations and comments. For example, this blog post of one user’s opinion has pretty inflamatory comments from various KDE and GNOME users.
Of course, one example can’t possibly be extended to the F/OSS community at large, but I’ve been around long enough to notice the pattern.
I guess that the level of flammage concerning a particular religious issue or area of interest is proportional to the perceived importance of that item to the community at large. For example, the long-running holy war between vi-ers and emacsen is about which tool (the humble programmer’s editor) is the best for the job at hand. I’m not particularly a zealot in that arena— I use both ViM and GNU Emacs on my machines, depending on context. I don’t mind using either one of them for development, although I am more comfortable with Emacs.
My (devalued) two cents’ worth. Flames go to /dev/null.
Previously: Skunkworks and Late Night Hacks