Everything Else

chicaneuk wrote: When you come across as being so militant and strongly opinionated in your beliefs it just turns people off from listening to you. Couple that with, frankly, the rather crazy looking appearance and the average person who has no knowledge about free software and so forth will basically cross the road to avoid him and his message.

Agreed. If you behave in a repulsive manner, guess what, people will be repulsed by you. Abusing them further for being repulsed will not help either.

The message and the messenger are two different things, true, but if the messenger goes out of his way to conduct himself in a manner that compromises the success of the message, he has put his self/ego above the message. He is hurting his "cause" more than anyone else can.

I'm with skywriter on this one. However loopy Stallman's philosophy, the packages that were developed and distributed early on under the FSF/GNU umbrella were a godsend. BSD UNIX source code was difficult to come by off-campus prior to the 1990s, and if you did so surreptitiously there was always a lingering fear of AT&T's lawyers... Life with UNIX before the Net/2 release, and really before the resolution of the USL vs. BSDi lawsuit in '94, was very different.