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The Battle Between Purists and Pragmatists
Glyn Moody has a thoughtful piece taking a long look at the never-ending battle between pragmatists and purists in free and open software. "While debates rage around whether Mono is good or bad for free software, and about 'fauxpen source' and 'Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists,' people are overlooking the fact that these are just the latest in a series of such arguments about whether the end justifies the means. There was the same discussion when KDE was launched using the Qt toolkit, which was proprietary at the time, and when GNOME was set up as a completely free alternative. But could it be that this battle between the 'purists' and the 'pragmatists' is actually good for free software — a sign that people care passionately about this stuff — and a major reason for its success?"
Purists are just pragmatists who believe that moral imperatives are an adequate tool for achieving effective collective bargaining.
When the bargain fails to materialize, the purists blame a defective culture. And the pragmatists just roll their eyes.
It can backfire.
For instance, take the whole mess with BitKeeper: The pragmatic option was to use a product with really obnoxious licensing terms, because it was good and worked at the time. Then one day Larry McVoy got really annoyed with Andrew Tridgell, and decided to refuse to even sell licenses to people associated with the OSDL, including Linus Torvalds.
That's the problem, while it works everything seems fine, but when the rug is suddenly pulled from under you, it suddenly creates a lot of complications that get in the way of getting useful things done. I think there's quite a lot of value in making sure that you'll be able to use tomorrow something you're using today.
People who label themselves as "pragmatic" simply aren't willing or able to consider their own interests on a longer timeline. A lot of them tell me that they finally realized that RMS was right about something, but it took them years, including a bad experience that was their own fault, to realize.
Bruce Perens.
There are periodically arguments of ideological integrity vs. pragmatism in all areas. I usually react by asking "which foot do you use to walk?" or "when you climb a mountain, to you look at the path to the summit or to your feet?". Both ideology and pragmatism are required. If you use only ideology, you will not get anything practical done; if you use only pragmatism, you get something done, but it may well be in the wrong direction.
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A few months ago, some usenet crackpot posted his latest mathematical research. Among the usual nonsense and ravings about a world-wide conspiracy of academic mathematicians, possibly under the control of aliens (the space kind), to suppress his work, there were some points of mathematical interest--some potentially neat patterns and relationships in how he was wrong.
I spent a very enjoyable few weeks investigating these, using Mathematica to aid in this. I was able to find things using Mathematica that I would not have found otherwise--even using the best current free mathematical software, and those taught me a lot, both directly, and from the books I then consulted.
The most pure purists, such as RMS, take the position that I should not have done that mathematical investigation, because I could not do it without using non-free software. I'm supposed to wait until I can do it with free software, and maybe contribute to developing said free software if I want to speed things up.
If life were infinite, I would consider that. Life is not infinite, so I will go ahead and use the tools that let me get done the things I want to get done during this short life. I see no difference between, say, riding in a vehicle like a boat or plane where I cannot inspect and study the engine and using a piece of software where I cannot see the code. For the boat, all I care about is that it accomplishes the task I need--getting me safely to my destination. Same for software.
Define "define".
#define define
Can we move on?
As a 'purist' in this sense myself, I feel somewhat justified in claiming that without the purists, there would never have been such a pragmatist movement as there is now. Let's face it: in all likelihood, if I were a pragmatist, I'd be using proprietary software tools to write programs and share information--because that was, and perhaps still is, the easy option. Purists, on the other hand, reject compromise when that compromise will eventually result in their freedoms being restricted.
Actually, free software is the pragmatic option: it guarantees that, in the future, I'll be able to code using free, compatible tools. Software that compromises on freedom will eventually fall into the trap of convenient, non-free, proprietary software that will eventually restrict my freedom in the future to write and share and change programs in an upstanding, moral way.
My two cents.