dear Bruce,

first of all thanks for joining the discussion here, I feel like
saying in particular because I am a long time fan of your seminal work
for the free and open source communities (shall I write society) and
many other VUAs are and of all people I think you do deserve a proper
welcome. I sincerely hope you enjoy your stay.

On Tue, 25 Apr 2017, Bruce Perens wrote:

>    On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 4:36 PM, Steve Litt wrote:

>

>       the distinction he strongly made was that Open Source didn't
>      prioritize freedom, but instead prioritized convenience and
>      value to business, and he felt that was a bad thing.

>
> You didn't dream this, it's what he says. The problem with the *a
> priori* approach that people must be won over to valuing their
> freedom first is that it doesn't win everyone. And Richard doesn't
> have a viable approach for the people it doesn't win. The problem
> with the Open Source approach is that some folks may indeed never
> get any farther than appreciating the convenience and value to
> business. But I figure that if we win some of them over to
> understanding Free Software, it's a win.

This is a pretty concise and precise assessment for what the whole
story is about. RMS is a light in the dark when it comes to ethics in
all areas where software can be applied and from a philosophical point
of view I very much agree with his thoughts on the matter.

But it must also be said that, because of a somehow less pragmatic
approach in presenting F/OSS, quite some distance has been created
between people that... see these things starting from different angles

Of all miseries this may have caused, among them most prominently that
business people still fail to imagine there can be a business model in
F/OSS as of 2017 anno domini, is that often the position of RMS
brought much separation rather than reconciliation.

Back to us, it's funny I'm writing this from the camp of the people
who were forced to fork Debian in order to keep their freedom intact.
However I do believe it is Devuan's effort (and the effort of other
distributions as Gentoo, Manjaro, Slackware etc.) to bring a
possibility for unity in diversity. In the larger picture I recognise
your effort with OSI as quite similar (but much more important) in
bringing unity across a spectrum of different well meaning thinkers.

ciao