Found this in my looney bin. A couple of weeks old but posting it here for future reference. Bookmarking or taking a snapshot of my mind to review a year (or years) after for those Back to the Future (tm) moments :D.
On F/OSS Advocacy:
Advocating FOSS arrogantly as something so technically superior than commercial alternatives is idealism on the wrong side of the coin. This might work in geek circles, but is not the nicest or effective way of reaching a broader audience.
Not minding existing solutions is bad too. The way some FOSS projects is headed, humbly acknowledging and learning from existing solutions is a great leap forward wider FOSS adoption. Technologies such as Cairo, XGL/Compiz, etc., are just a taste of things to come. The FOSS desktop is finally maturing to the point of mass usability. On the server space, we see efforts to simplify administration, this is an era where we see more focus on automation, tuning and monitoring. A good example would be to see recent developments of Theo's OpenBSD gang and FreeBSD dtrace port.
Look at OS X, *lots* of FOSS components in there. An interface that even Grandma can use, yet pop the hood and you have something there to titillate the geek in you. Recent FOSS desktop developments acknowledges this facts, clearly seeing the value of hiding the technical mojo from the casual user, and yet still have the terminal in case the user wants to get down and dirty to expand his horizon.
Technical superiority alone is not an effective marketing tactic. There is more to FOSS than technical superiority.
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