It seems that Nelson over at the OSI’s Web site is confused about how “fundamentalist” can be applied to an Open Source advocate.

It can be done; one just has to remember that a “fundie” (the variant of the word which makes the malicious connotation clear) is someone that exists at a special place called the end of the spectrum. You can have a fundie of religion, or a fundie of operating systems, or a fundie of text editors. (Hey, we get all of those and more in the Unix world! Then again, you get them in the real world, and the Microsoft world, and just about everywhere you can go—online or in the meatspace.)

“Fundies” are all about being on one end of the spectrum or the other. You can’t argue that fundies have to be Christian fundies, because that makes just as much sense as it would make to call Roy Schestowitz an anti-Novell “fundie”. There is nothing fundamentalist about an operating system or a religion, no matter how many people believe that $RELIGION was the first around, the longest lasting, the One True Thing. We all have a tendency to have biased thoughts like that about our favorite deities, religions, operating systems, or text editors. And the term “fundie” applies to those who have such a bias, that they cannot see anything else in the domain of the conversation.

Think about Socrates Meets Jesus, wherein Socrates and Jesus Christ have a dialog which goes in circles in avoidance of anything concrete. Much the same can be found in any religion: there simply isn’t much that is concrete about it. (People will argue that spirituality is the thing that religion tries to access, though I’d tend to disagree, since most people that try to sell “spirituality” are also selling “religion”.)

That having been said, each member of each religion can all claim that their religion is the one that is fundamental to the existence of the world and all of creation, and so it is necessary to get that none of it is fundamental (because all of them cannot be fundamental, for they are all different things). Furthermore, it’s obvious that an operating system, a text editor, and a programming language which exist today cannot be considered to be fundamental; even the “fundamental language” of computing (the binary number system) can be considered to not be fundamental, since the world existed way before we figured out different based numbering systems.

Much like Asimov’s first usage of the word “fundie”, at which point the word did not yet have a definition. It is adaptable, too, though the dictionaries (and even Wikipedia) are a bit behind on the usage of the word “fundie” to refer to anything other than Christians.