[sanderjd]

> A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea.

I really dislike this kind of "geez, read the room!" thinking. Not everybody needs to have the same opinion about everything. Not everybody should. The opinion of "the room" or in your terminology, the "intended audience", is ever-evolving and the way that happens is via people talking and writing about their own opinions that aren't identical to the prevailing views of the time.

But it's fine that you disagree with the author about this and are unswayed by the author's arguments. Others will agree with the author and be unswayed by your counter-arguments, and that's fine too. Still others will change their views after reading the article or responses to it, and that's also fine. Maybe the prevailing view will shift as a result of all this discussion, maybe it won't. This is how discourse works!

[samatman]

I think you missed a fine point in my comment. Seeking to avoid offending absolutely everyone who reads your article is fruitless. Sometimes the point is to offend, and that, too, has its time and place.

It's when you start adding a paragraph defending your decision to offend your audience that you should give some thought to whether that is, in fact, why you're writing. If it isn't, don't. The author wasn't writing to piss off the FOSS community, that wasn't the topic, just the outcome. Why would I give credence to someone's opinions about open source if they flagrantly refer to things which aren't open source using that term? If you can't get the basics right, you have nothing to say which I want to hear.

[sanderjd]

Ah! I do see your more subtle point now, and I think it's a reasonable one.

It reminds me of the common writing advice to not hedge statements with a lot of "I think" and "I believe", because that's redundant, if it wasn't what you think, then you wouldn't be writing it, and it weakens statements, making it sound like the writer lacks conviction in the statement, and if you lack conviction in what you're writing then you definitely shouldn't write it.

That has always sounded right to me, but in the final accounting, I'm skeptical of it. Certainty just isn't all that natural, ambivalence is common, and I think hedging captures that reality more accurately in the tone of the writing.

And I think this case is the same. That paragraph is acknowledging a reality that many or most people reading the article will know, to the point that omitting any mention of it at all will seem notable. I think it is relatable and tactful to say "I know this isn't a popular view, but I care about it so here goes anyway". It doesn't imply that they are writing in order to offend. It only implies that they are aware of the situation.

I don't really get the thing about whether or not it impacts the credence with which you should take the opinions of the author... And frankly, I don't think it is the important thing; the important thing is the argument they are making. But FWIW, if it were the important thing, this particular author has an enormous amount of credibility in the space of working on a successful open source project...