Celebrity advice

[A.M. Kuchling]

On 28 Aug 2003 04:17:56 -0700, 
	Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.net> wrote:
> P.S. And the reason why many people find ESR to be offensive or just
> plain inappropriate is that one gets the feeling that he wants you to
> buy into his whole agenda, whether or not that involves running around
> with a firearm in the woods dressed as Obi-Wan or Yoda.

For me the big problem with the recent statement is that it doesn't look
very professional, coming from the president of a group.  It should have
been written more formally and without the invective, and having Star Wars
references simply scream "loser in a basement".

It's really a pity that open source has no really effective spokesperson at
this time.  

     * RMS is unbending in his convictions whether large (such as the value
       of free software) or small (the whole GNU/Linux naming thing).  
       I admire his resolution, but it hampers his effectiveness 
       as a speaker to mainstream media and businesses.

     * ESR started out pretty well:  "CatB", whatever its flaws might be,
       is a useful set of observations.  Some bits of them might have 
       been anticipated by others, but he was the first to assemble them all
       together and there are new ideas in there.  (I found the idea of
       project spaces to be new and illuminating.)
       
       But... none of the followup essays were as notable, and he hasn't
       developed anything very impressive (fetchmail is useful, but not 
       tremendously impressive).  Worst, now he seems to be rewriting the
       world to match his views.  NTK is reliably snarky about it, but also
       dead-on: see the second item in "Hard News" at
       http://www.ntk.net/2003/06/06/.
              
     * Linus does a pretty good job as a public speaker, and he doesn't have
       any of RMS's or ESR's baggage, but he's also not very interested
       in the job.  (The same goes for Guido.)
       
The best candidate is Bruce Perens, IMHO.  He has the technical background
of working on a non-trivial project (Debian), yet writes and presents in a
style that doesn't attract attention and doesn't let irrelevancies intrude.
Compare his commentary on SCO (http://www.perens.com/SCO/SCOSlideShow.html)
with ESR's counterblast.  (To be fair, ESR's analysis of the code is also
pretty good; the OSI letter is where it becomes unacceptable.)

Here's hoping Perens' group, Global Technology Policy Institute, becomes a
success.

--amk