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Kevin Carmony Responds to Criticism
sharkscott writes to tell us that LXer's Don Parris took a few minutes to get Kevin Carmony's response to the large amount of criticism he has been taking over offering non-free software in Linspire. From the article: "Essentially, Carmony's position is that, in ten years of holding out, the FOSS community has made relatively few gains, in terms of convincing vendors to release libre codecs and drivers. In other words, the strategy doesn't seem to be working. Additionally, while some will be patient, most users would prefer to have something - anything - that works in the meanwhile."
I'm guessing that this response was motivated (at least in part) by the effort of PJ at Groklaw. For those that have visited recently, PJ did a scathing article on Linspire/Freespire. Really harsh stuff which a lot of people found pretty unwarranted. Myself included.
... deleted. Then it descended into farce.
So I posted anonymously as I usually do. The odd thing that happened to me was that I found my post deleted. So I posted again
She seemed convinced that this was an orchestrated attack by Linspire "astroturfers". And when Kevin posted to the forum, she wouldn't talk to him and asked him for an apology from the (imaginary, IMHO) astroturfers. Having said that, Kevin did quote an email he sent PJ which I thought was poor form.
Anyway, I literally sat there for ages watching post after post being deleted which I thought was amazing. A large number of these posts were quite sensible. They just didn't tow the Groklaw line.
When it had calmed down a couple of days later, I posted that here is a place where they discuss free speech, but don't practice it. Quite frankly, the amount of groupthink and censorship I saw left me with a very different opinion of the place.
The best thing about Slashdot's comment system is that it keeps all the posts. Even the trolls.