Submission + - Eric Raymond on why Stallman is a dangerous fanatic (ibiblio.org)
Frosty Piss writes: According to Eric Raymond, 'RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes. While he made consequentialist arguments against closed source (and still does) his rhetoric and his thinking became dominated by terms like “evil”, to the point where he repeatedly alienated potential allies both with his absolutism and his demand that anyone cooperating with him share it.' Raymond goes on to say, 'By the late 1990s, after having observed RMS’s behavior for more than a decade, I had long since concluded that the Free Software Foundation’s moralistic rhetoric was serving us badly. The problem with it is the same problem with messianic religions in general; for people who are not flipped into true-believer mode by any given one, it will come off as at best creepy and insular, at worst nutty and potentially dangerous (and this remains true even for people attached to a different messianic religion).'
