Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 15:18:59 -0400
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net, editors@linuxtoday.com, malda@slashdot.org, x@linux.com,
Subject: Shut Up And Show Them The Code

In a Slashdot posting[1] published today, RMS distances himself from
the Open Source movement because (he says) we avoid talking about
"freedom, about principle, about the rights that computer users are
entitled to".

He's right.  We do avoid that.  But not because we don't care about
"freedom", "principle" or "rights".  Speaking for myself, I trust that
anybody who's ever heard me speak or read my writings on the First [2]
or Second [3] Amendments knows that I am quite passionate and vocal
about freedom and rights; like RMS, I defend them even when they are
unpopular with my audience.  Other Open Source advocates don't seem to
me to be any slower than I to speak the language of "freedom" and "rights"
when they judge it is appropriate.

But "when they judge it is appropriate" is a very important qualifier.
There are two different kinds of reasons an open-source advocate might 
avoid speaking about RMS's `freedom'; either disagreement with his goals,
or a judgment that doing so is ineffective, is bad tactics.

The difference is important, and this is where RMS misrepresents what
we are about.  He would have you believe that the FSF and OSI have
diverged over vast matters of principle, when in fact the OSI (and the
Open Source movement as a whole) is carefully designed to be able to
include people with beliefs like RMS's.

The Open Source Initiative does not have a position for or against
RMS's goals.  Please don't take my word for this; go look at our
advocacy materials on the Open Source website[4], especially the part
in the FAQ where it says "Open Source is a marketing program for free
software".

Now it is true that some individuals associated with OSI occasionally
argue with some of RMS's goals and principles (and one of those
individuals is me).  But the OSI is a big-tent organization; we have
never condemned RMS's principles, and never will -- because we don't
need to!

The real disagreement between OSI and FSF, the real axis of discord 
between those who speak of "open source" and "free software", is not 
over principles.  It's over tactics and rhetoric.  The open-source
movement is largely composed not of people who reject RMS's ideals,
but rather of people who reject his *rhetoric*.

Is this justified? Well -- consider the 180-degree turnaround in
press and mainstream perception that has taken place in the last
fourteen months, since many people in our tribe started pushing the
same licenses and the same code we used to call "free software" under
the "open source" banner. 

Where we used to be ignored and dismissed, we are now praised and
respected. The same press that used to dismiss "free software" as a
crackpot idea now falls over itself writing laudatory articles about
"open source".  And the same corporate titans who dismissed RMS as a
`communist' are lining up to pour money and effort into open-source
development.  Our market share and mind share have both zoomed to a
level that would have seemed the stuff of delirious fancy as recently
as January of last year.

Have all the opinion leaders and executives who have turned around
suddenly seen the pure light of the GNU manifesto?  No; instead, they
point to the work of Open Source advocates to explain their
conversion.

OSI's tactics *work*.  That's the easy part of the lesson.  The hard
part is that the FSF's tactics *don't work*, and never did.  If RMS's
rhetoric had been effective outside the hacker community, we'd have
gotten where we are now five or ten years sooner and OSI would have
been completely unnecessary (and I could be writing code, which I'd
much rather be doing than this...).

None of this takes anything away from RMS's prowess as a programmer or
his remarkable effectiveness at mobilizing other hackers to do good
work.  Emacs and gcc and the GNU code base are an absolutely essential
part of our toolkit and our cultural inheritance, for which RMS
deserves every praise (which is why I led a standing ovation to him at
last LinuxWorld after observing that "without RMS, none of us would be
here today").  But as an evangelist to the mainstream, he's been one
fifteen-year long continuous disaster.

It's important for all of us hackers to be clear about that, because
RMS's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind of people we are.  We
hackers are thinkers and idealists who readily resonate with appeals
to "principle" and "freedom" and "rights". Even when we disagree with
bits of his program, we want RMS's rhetorical *style* to work; we
think it ought to work; we tend to be puzzled and disbelieving when
it fails on the 95% of people who aren't wired like we are.

So when RMS insists that we talk about "computer users' rights", he's
issuing a dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old
failures.  It's one we should reject -- not because his principles are
wrong, but because that kind of language, applied to software, simply
does not persuade anybody but us.  In fact, it confuses and repels
most people outside our culture.

RMS's best propaganda has always been his hacking.  So it is for all
of us; to the rest of the world outside our little tribe, the
excellence of our software is a *far* more persuasive argument for
openness and freedom than any amount of highfalutin appeal to abstract
principles.  So he next time RMS, or anybody else, urges you to "talk
about freedom", I urge you to reply "Shut up and show them the code."

[1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/06/28/1311232&mode=thread

[2] http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/netfreedom/index.html

[3] http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/guns/

[4] http://www.opensource.org/

(Note: This essay may be freely redistributed.  HTML is available at
<URL:http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/shut-up-and-show-them.html>.)
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we
decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will
win and the decent people will lose.
        -- James Earl Jones