Advocacy

[DCT Jared Smith]

I was recently in a conversation about Linux advocacy
with some Windows advocates. From my best guess, I would
ken they were hoping to draw me into Windows advocacy,
because they were very revealing of thoughts and concerns
which I had no idea even existed. They expressed freely,
as if I were one of them. Another guess would be that 
they simply _thought_ I was a secret Windows advocate, like
they are. I am not. I mean, I didn't even know it was possible 
to 'advocate Windows,' not in the way I saw it happen 
in this conversation.

I learned a lot, especially about how I've been going about
OSS advocacy inefficiently.

Now here is the thing. The revelation that people could be
such stout advocates of Windows made me rethink some
things. Indeed, as a result of this conversation, I realized 
that pretty much everyone who is not an overt OSS 
supporter _is_ a Windows supporter, or at least an 
interested lurker on that list :-).

Paradigm shift, for me.

It goes deep enough that, to these people, every single mention 
of Linux is seen as an arrogant jab, a condescending "I'm a
supergeek since I know how to use Linux, and you don't, so 
you must be just a proletariat programmer." kind of statement.
I discovered that without even mentioning Windows, mention
of Linux chafes the Windows advocate.

For the brief window of that single conversation, which I
doubt will ever happen again, I got to see how Windows
advocates talk in private about Linux advocates.

It's surprisingly like the other way around, when Linux
advocates talk about Windows. What is revealing (and 
previously invisible to me because I agree with the basic premise 
of Linux advocacy, but here I didn't agree) is that a great 
amount of the conversation is rhetoric designed to put the other 
side down. 

This I believe is an artificial way of lifting ourselves up. 
Now I understand how both sides do it.

A more durable way of lifting ourselves up is to make one of
the strengths of our advocacy our willingness to help
others deal with their programming issues WITHOUT advocating 
anything. It's slower, but more sure, because this actively tears 
down walls, instead of building them up. In other words, let 
our actions and attitudes speak more than our words.

Now this is what I believe. In the presence of a room full
of Linux users, even then, it is wise to leave advocacy
out of the conversation, because you never know when
one of those users is dearly devoted to Windows, and rankles
to hear Windows being slammed, which is exactly where I
found myself the other day (in reverse).

My point is that if we're going to get beyond Windows,
we have to leave behind marketing techniques forged in
competitiveness, which include FUD.

I like competition. May the best man win. What I want
to rise above is taunting.

For example, at the same time as we who love and use Open 
Source Software speak with appreciation of its strengths,
we must go out of our way to speak with understanding of
the fact that those very strengths are seen as weaknesses
to the people who love and use Windows. 

For example

As I see it, Windows folks are primarily interested in making 
money, and for them, programming is simply a WAY to make 
money.

Yet

Linux folks are primarily interested in programming, and 
are delighted that they can make money at something they
love.

Thus, if you want to inspire a Windows person regarding 
OSS, it is silly to tell him 'it's free.' A Windows programmer 
hears the word free, and it's not inspiring. To him, it means 
overtime-without-pay. Yet the same verbiage makes a
Linuxhead all degrees of happy. So it's okay to say it,
but condition it with the fact that "in addition to being free,
it's a way to make money, because it is inherently well-
designed." Something to that effect...

Here is another example, and I think it is a stroke of
genius not understood about the genesis of Perl. When
Perl was first implemented, Larry Wall was hesitant to
start a whole discussion group about Perl, because he
felt it would isolate people from each other. Instead, he
began to seed the Unix discussion groups, as he writes,
"very politely." When someone had a question that was
solved well with Perl, he would answer the question 
without reference to Perl. Then, he would say "but if you
want to do it even easier, here's how you could do it in
Perl..." and give them the Perl answer.

I think that was a very graceful way to introduce Perl.
It took more work than bald advocacy.

Here is a final example. In the long message to the kclug
list from Jim Herrmann, he very briefly mentioned
itdepends.com. He did not mention it in an advocacy
sort of way, but simply as a matter of fact while talking
about the details of spoofing MS Passport. Curious, and with 
a spare moment on my hands, I checked out itdepends.com,
and found it to be ... well, it depends what I found it
to be, but I found it to be precisely that. That form of
advocacy is not artificial. It's the best kind. (But then
again, 'best' implies there is a hierarchy, and thus a
'worst,' and maybe here I am drifting so far off my original
point that I oughta wrap up this little advocacy of
non-advocacy. :-))

Perhaps you have already made this observation; to me,
it is a new one.

-Jared