We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

ESR has already helped several free software projects convert from CVS to Git using his existing computer. The bigger the project, the longer it takes. (Each attempt to convert the Emacs repos takes 8 hours with his current computer.) He has studied the C code for doing the conversion, and determined that the best sort of computer for doing these conversions would be as fast as possible (doesn't matter how many cores; this is a single-thread process) and would have as much RAM as possible. Graphics card? Whatever, who cares. Keyboard, mouse? Not going to buy those, he already has those. Oh, and he would prefer it not sound like a leaf blower so he is looking for quiet power supply and a case with large quiet fans.

He says that several people spontaneously donated money to help him buy a better computer. So he opened up a discussion for how to best spend the money.

Several people urged him to only use ECC RAM, which means either an AMD chip or a Xeon. Someone just donated $1000 (!!!) so he has pretty much settled on the Xeon.

Once he has this, he will go around to free software projects and offer to do the conversion for them. His plan is to grab a copy of the CVS repo, run the conversion to make sure there are no surprises, then ask the project maintainers to stop modifying the CVS repo while he runs the final conversion.

This seems like a reasonable service for him to be offering. Instead of each project figuring out the conversion process, he will become an expert on CVS to Git conversions (with more experience than anyone else) and he will have the purpose-built computer to do the conversions as quickly as possible. So he really will be saving time and hassle for the various projects.

P.S. He converted the NetHack repos, and stirred up a hornets' nest. Read about it here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6389&cpage=1#comment-1207141

If you find it necessary to compare Rossi to Tesla to support your point, I think Rossi is the clear winner of the exchange.

You will never reach the denialists with facts and logic.

Seriously, what's so broken about X? Is it just a pain in the ass for developers to work with?

You might seek out some of the tech talks given by Wayland developers. They lay it out pretty clearly.

Here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

From memory, X11 is full of cruft that no longer makes sense. Everyone wants beautifully rendered, anti-aliased fonts, but X11 not only doesn't give you that, if you comply with X11 you can't do that.

Wayland took a look at how X11 is actually used, today, and throws away the cruft that nobody uses anymore. Also Wayland adds a sane API versioning system.

Wayland is exactly as network-transparent as X11 is in actual use these days: not very but you can make it work. Everyone is pretty much asking X11 for a drawing canvas, drawing on it, then giving it to a compositor to display. See above comments about beautifully anti-aliased fonts.

My favorite comment: "Everybody says the UNIX way is small programs that do one thing well. What is the 'one thing' that X11 does well?" He pointed out that at one point X11 had a print server embedded in it (it wasn't a good idea).

TL;DR Several of the top X11 developers think Wayland is a very good idea.

1) Destroy instutionalized education and rebuild it with features like Oh, I don't know...how about not penalizing people who think differently and degrees based on contribution to society and not paper exams?

2) How about not destroying our economic base by giving bankers hundreds of trillions in benefits for raping society and well, maybe using that money to build something we need...like a new propulsion tech not based on Newtonian Physics?

I would be willing to bet with 17 trillion dollars that the Bankers go we could probably do something interesting....like open the entire resource base of the solar system to a growing humanity with lots of problems.