Re: Open source and government

[brian_d_foy]

I didn't think much of that post. To me, the undercurrent is that he is largely ineffective and is looking for faults in others to explain his lack of success.

I know quite a few people actually in government (not outside advocates) using plenty of open source. When I was working under a government contract for DoE (one department about which he complains), we were using quite a bit of Perl and Tcl. Scientists, in the original spirit of open source, even passed around programs they had written in other languages that you might have to buy a compiler for.

That he never met anyone who cared about the people they served simply shows he couldn't make friends or didn't meet enough people. He probably presented himself as a typical religous geek-freak, and that puts people off. If you want to convince people to do something, you have to win them over not necessarily by the merits of your argument but by taking care of any emotional or psychological blocks they might have. You don't do that with rational arguments, and you don't just flip a switch in someone to turn them into a beleiver.

You can't treat people like idiots then wonder why they don't listen to you.

But then, I agree with Mark Jason's Why I Hate Advocacy.

Update: I knew I had written about this before. It's TPR 1.1: "How (not) to be a Perl Advocate", which I drew heavily from Mark Jason's article and Nat Torkington's Be an Advocate, Not an Asshole talk from YAPC::NA 2000.