Open Source Advocacy The Right Way

[vmlinuz] writes "With a rapid succession of people moving towards Open Source, advocacy and evangelism is increasingly important in helping organizations to move over. The O'Reilly Network has begun publishing a series of articles about Open Source by Jono Bacon that teaches how to approach advocacy sensibly and more productively." From the article: "Although Aristotle developed his message many, many years ago, the concept of optimizing how we talk to people has developed further throughout history. From Aristotle to Heraclitus to Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Keller to George Bernard Shaw, many people have advocated new thinking in times of rabid opposition."

Comments

You mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a geek that hasn't showered in a week, constantly rambling about "Evil Micro$oft" isn't a good way to advocate OSS?

What about yelling First Post????

Linux Evangelism

[Stanistani]

*Leans over podium*
Brethern, it is the time of the Apocalypse!
Stand up and be saved!
*Thumps loudly on "Linux in a Nutshell"*
Who is ready to receive saaaaalvation?!

Re:Linux Evangelism

[ackthpt]

Who is ready to receive saaaaalvation?!

Let me be the first radical fundamentalist to ask whether you are some heathen using an IDE or one of the vi chosen?

Please separate yourselves into camps of worthy and unclean. ;-)

GASP!

[Dorsai65]

You mean that calmly and rationally pointing out the benefits of something accomplishes more that foaming-at-the-mouth, in-your-face, mine-is-the-One-True-Way evangelism?

Nah, can't be. If things really worked that way, just think of all the time thats been wasted...

Re:Here's my take on it

[Dana P'Simer]

Empirical evidence has shown, time and time again, that low level languages like C and Forth produce more efficient, faster, and easier to maintain code than today's so called high level languages. Why is this important? Because they (the IT world, who simply wants to sell you a new compiler every year for $2,000) try to push stuff like encapsulation and polymorphism down your throat as the saving grace and you simply accept it as fact because you don't know any better. If you're not bit shifting hot registers at runtime then you're not programming. Plain and simple. You're just plugging different blocks together and hoping like hell it will work. How would you feel if they designed bridges like that? I wouldn't feel too secure driving across a bridge that was designed like today's non open source software programs are.

I have to disagree, the fact is, any language can produce inefficient and difficult to maintain code. The difference is not the language, it is the programmer. Donald Knuth does not spend too much time "swapping hot registers" in his books, "The Art of Computer Programming" and those books, more than any other, defined what programming is. At its finest, it is the pursuit of the most efficient algorithm. I think you and I agree on that. In C++, I can write a sorting algorithm that sorts objects that are not even the same concrete type. To do that in C I would have to add a similar level of overhead that C++ provides built in. Now, I am not saying that C++ is better than C. I am saying that we should use the tools that are best suited to the problem at hand. If your problem requires ploymophism then use a language that supports it. BTW, encapsulation is done in C all the time. Look at the fopen and friends API. Unless you are accessing the members of the FILE structure directly you are practicing "encapsulation".

Now, I think the problem really is that the "High Level Languages" make people think that they are programmers when they are not. People who have not developed the skill necessary to write good code in any language can jump in and produce results. Those results might be low par and hard to maintain but they have been produced, and that is what the folks with the money want. They don't care that the code is sloppy and poorly designed. They just see the program working. Later on down the road they might care when they have to spend double the money to maintain the beast. But that is for another day.

What's definitely the wrong way...

[ssj_195]

...is the way I was introduced to Linux and the open-source world. "Open-source software never crashes!" (false); "Open-source software is nearly always better than proprietary software!" (true in some cases, but on the whole, I would say, false); "Install Linux and all your problems will be solved!" (he he he :)) These are all "facts" (albeit roughly paraphrased) that I heard, from several sources about Linux and open-source in general.

So I excitedly downloaded and burned some Mandrake 9.1 CDs, installed (amazingly painless), and entered this whole new world of Linux and Open Source.

There are many ways you could describe my reaction to the yawning gulf between expectation and reality: "furious backlash" would be one; "blind seething rage and betrayal" would be another. The catalogue of disasters and frustrations that followed left me cursing the names of the people who recommended Linux to me as this wonderful cure-all and utterly *hating* Linux with every fibre of my being. I actually stuck with it for a few more days and, after deciding that linux was the most pointless project I had ever had the misfortune of dabbling with, returned to the comparatively hassle-free bosom of Windows.

Luckily for me, the story didn't end there and some persistent and random lockups in Windows led me to re-install Linux (Mandrake 10, this time around) to see whether it was hardware or driver related (a dodgy fan on my graphics card, for what it's worth). This time around, with my expectations greatly lowered (in fact, by this stage, Linux had improved unrecognisably, and I was very pleased with its progress), I fell head-over-heels in love and haven't had Windows installed since.

But it could so easily have gone the other way; it is hard to explain just how much the hype followed by disappointment soured me on Linux at the time (an understatement!) and it is my firm belief that if I had been forewarned about the things that I could do in Windows but not in Linux, I would not have reacted so sharply. So now, when "recommending" Linux to the curious, I usually start with a list of negatives (some hardware may not work; you may not be able to run your favourite games; don't expect installation of software to follow the Windows model, or you'll be in a world of hurt) before extolling its non-pragmatic virtues ("It's an operating system with love in it!"). It's heartening that quite a few people are still willing to give it a shot even after hearing my litany of gloom :)

So in a nutshell, don't be a blind fanboy, or you will be Open Source's worst enemy; let people know that there will be concessions to make, but that many people still feel the switch is worth it. Make a special point of mentioning just how different and customisable it can be (show them a variety of WMs, from the absurdly minimalist (Ratpoision) to the wonderfully glitzy (Enlightenment) - this diversity and difference from the comparative homogeniety of Windows usually gets people curious, in my experience). Don't oversell it, as this is just a recipe for disaster.

Oh, and this post mainly deals with the casual home PC user, so might be a little off-topic - apologies for that :)