Yesterday I was browsing through the internet when I came across this link with the quote
“Microsoft has pushed DirectX into Intel’s silicon,” explained to us a reader
Can there be a limit on sensationalism? Dr Roy cannot escape his responsibilities by quoting misleading facts. Now, instead of cribbing all over, I headed to their IRC channel and met schestowitz and explained him the case. He did agree that that quote is not exactly true. Still that article is not edited to reflect the truth.
Roy was very polite and patient while I expressed my opinions, which is actually a good thing. Since it was a weekend and I could not go out due to some personal reason, I decided to stay on the channel just to know their real motives.
Microsoft employees are devils
This is a common belief that Microsoft employees are working day and night to destroy the world. Arn’t all the policy decisions taken by the top execs. How many of the employees actually nod everytime Ballmer says Linux is cancer? Probably physically yes, they do nod. How many care?
Then MinceR jumped in and started proposing that they are evil/unethical people. I tried my best to explain that they need to earn their bread and butter. A vast majority of the software programmers don’t care about FOSS ideologies nor Microsoft’s ideologies. For them employment is a contract – you pay me, I work for you. Every person has a family to feed and a life to live. Social and peer pressure is also a factor why people want to work for Microsoft/Google/Yahoo etc. The dream of a better future is also a reason. I don’t paint every Microsoft employee as a devil.
Name calling is nothing new on #techrights/#boycottnovell , even I got flared, but I ignore those comments. It never came to my mind that some people think they have a right to be not polite. A strange right I never heard of.
Tobacco Industry
Roy thinks that tobacco industry is responsible for people’s death. I don’t disagree 100% as these industry cannot be completely absolved of their responsibilities. If people smoke and die, isn’t it the person’s fault. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. You cannot drop a nuclear bomb somewhere and blame nuclear technology for the devastation. Lastly remember that tobacco industry works only because we consume tobacco. It is a simple demand-supply equation.
I was even advised to go and read the principles of Gandhi(Ghandhi), which is strange since I was born and brought up in the country of Gandhi. If you want to take a page out of Gandhi’s struggle, look at civil disobedience, esp the Dandi March. He never needed to abuse or spread violence for achieving his target. Civil disobedience in FOSS world is to use FOSS products exclusively. Gandhi even called off Civil Disobedience when violence started occurring.
David Nielsen
So there is a common understanding that David being abused was good for the whole world. Look at the statement which David got
Matthew Woehlke: I’m going to guess a lot of that “disrespectful personal mail” revolves around the use of mono? And why shouldn’t it?
So there is a clarification that disrespecting is a right. There is also an explanation that this isn’t a harsh reply.
If this wasn’t enough, then you can even find out of context cooked-up statements like
| MinceR | once again, m4n1sh explains that verbal abuse is the greatest crime one can commit |
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| MinceR | presumably right ahead of copyright infringement. :> |
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| MinceR | murder is way behind |
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I have no clue how this all comparisons were made or I ever used murderer and copyright infringement ever. By the way nothing special, this is expected.
At that moment it was only sebsebseb who was actually talked rationally. He did explain his stand and took the pains to read the backlogs before discussing further.
Identica
As I am not on identi.ca, so sebsebseb told me “People on identi.ca don’t like omgubuntu“. Actually I don’t find any reason to be on identi.ca. Just because it runs FOSS? Identi.ca is the smaller brother of twitter which lacks wit and sarcasm. There is no humour in any dents. Twitter community rocks. identi.ca community needs to improve themselves. StatusNet software for running identi.ca is great, but that hardly matters if you don’t have a good community.
I wanted to pass some links on how identi.ca is sort of usless, but I would reserve them for further use.
OMG Ubuntu
So the crime OMG Ubuntu committed is that they don’t scream and run around the room crying “Mono is crap and a threat”. I have seen all kinds of reviews on OMG Ubuntu including applications written in C, C++, Python, Vala, C# or any other language out there. It’s a news site and does it work as required. You cannot be impartial by leaving out Mono applications and calling yourself great. Leave that decision of using mono applications on the authors. They probably have more brains than you actually think.
They are pissed off at David writing blog posts about Banshee on OMG Ubuntu. Joey is not a programmer not any super-techie guy. Everyone does his fair part of job. One great comment is
the entirety of omgubuntu is juvenile, ignorant, and not worth our attention
That comment holds good for techrights actually. I firmly believe that you cannot say anything without annoying people. If you are being opinionated you will hurt sentiments. People love to get annoyed and take offence.
Conclusion
I chuckle when I am called stupid, and weird comments like qu1j0t3: he’s reaching for any insult he can hurl at us especially I never used a single abusive word. When 4 people were answering at once with huge messages, it takes time to reply. When I could not, I got this compliment
he can’t pay attention, both of his neurons are occupied with worshipping m$.
The usage of constant M$ makes me laugh. That’s all you can do to promote free software?
schestowitz needs to make it clear whether he agrees with all these abuses and dogpiling? Otherwise people will consider all these comments to be the views of techrights community.
Does FOSS community need techrights? Is it bringing good name to the FOSS community? To the non-FOSS world are we looking extremist?
Now excuse me, I have to go and get some work done unlike techrights activists. I have a few assigned bugs, a few packages to build (learning) and write some documentation for my personal pet project.
