Negative campaigning

I didn’t take anything personally. I’m not personally offended. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. When I called for a little more respect, I was referring to the second half of your post:

   Like say, harassing people at malls and walking around in HAZMAT suits. I, for one, am expecting a bag of manure light on fire on my front porch.

I think that’s both an incorrect and a insulting characterization of Defective By Design. In any case, however, I appreciate your follow-up. I think I see what you meant.

In terms of your comments on negative campaigning, I think it’s worth approaching the concept of negative campaigns with a little more nuance. Their is often a blurry line between opposing negative policies and the type of smear campaigns common in politics which I think we both categorically oppose.

However, if one is taking an ethical position and trying to increase people’s freedom, it seems justified to not only speak about the benefits of the freedom but also against dispossession and disenfranchisement. The alternative is like saying that a campaign for abolishing child labor should only talk about how great a value adult workers are to their employers are or that a campaign trying to abolish land mines should talk about the benefits of two lower limbs. Or that a free speech organization should only speak out about the benefits of a free press and not try to organize opposition to censors.

You can find people writing a couple hundred years ago about how slavery should be abolished because they are economically inferior to low-wage labor. Maybe they were right, but the ethical arguments are what have taken hold. Whether it’s more or less efficient is moot; we as a society have abolished slavery because we believe it is wrong.

Now I’m not trying suggesting that these issues have equal ethical weight with software freedom, but I do believe that the FSF’s mission is similar in kind, if not in ethical clarity and importance. The FSF has always taken the position that software freedom is an ethical issue. As a a result, the FSF believes that it is both justified and essential to not only speak out about the benefits of software freedom but against people who are systematically disempowering people. And, in fact, it is useful to do so. Ask any civil liberties organization and they will tell you that they do better as things get worse. Like it or not, it is this type of “negative campaigning” against bad policies that sustains all of these organizations. And I think that in cases where it’s about taking strong ethical positions, that’s OK.

You may not support the FSF’s position that user control over technology is an ethical issue. If you don’t, you will almost certainly come to different conclusions about what are appropriate tactics and strategies for free software’s promotion. I think it’s in the interest of the productive dialog to attempt to wrap our heads around these differences and to try to view the situations from other perspectives before we turn to what can sometimes be nasty and unproductive criticism.