[throw2016]

It's hypocritical for people to continue to benefit from foss and complain about 'fundamentalists'.

Without that level of commitment no one would have used Linux and all the early immature and amateurish efforts, there are people here who know what a horror some of the efforts were to use and the long journey to today. Would any of the practical minded folks use any of that?

That part of the journey could only be made because of those motivated by ideals. The practical 'middle ground' mindset would not have delivered the rich open source world we know today.

If you don't subscribe to the ethics or values driving it it's perfectly ok, but mature discussion needs to recognize that commitment is required to achieve anything. Simply looking at the results and failing to appreciate what it took to get here is a recipe for failure in any endeavour.

[type0]

This seem to be the case, the author don't understand that FOSS is usually built by the communities of people that share the same fundamental values (he can call them fundamentalists for all he wants) but it doesn't make his arguments correct. When he complains that FOSS community doesn't embrace the proprietary software - how exactly does he imagine this to be done, no one dictates what software we should use so this discussion is completely nonsensical. This whole idea is like someone would go to the vegan party, bringing meat there and then complain that no one wanted to eat it. Just this unwarranted complaining is enough to persuade many people that could have bought his software to stay away.

[dpower]

I make an important distinction in the article. The FOSS community is not one 'type' of person. There are plenty in the FOSS community who use proprietary software. I have yet to hear a compelling argument on this thread for using FOSS software exclusively.