I get awfully sick and tired of people sometimes.  Especially when people claim that they support one thing and yet make it quite clear that they really don’t.

Let’s get something straight, people:  Freedom is a lot more than just free software or choices.  Freedom is a concept that most people who have gotten on the “free software” bandwagon of late just don’t understand!  It is awfully frightening; even RMS feels that freedom cannot be had without choice—his writings of the past 20+ years make it clear that he feels that choice is key, and these people are calling him “leader” without even knowing what it is he is fighting for!

It seems that the "free software" crowd these days assumes that if you do not hang off of their every word, accept their every inconsistent argument, and bow to their ways of making every last line of code free and GPL’d, you are the inconsistent one (because you’re inconsistent with them).  Even more to the point, I am utterly sick of running into people who learned about “free software” bloody yesterday and are now going “Oh, you bad NVIDIA user, you’re evil, you’re wrong, you’re hurting me just by using NVIDIA.”  Sure, asshole.  I’ll remember that the next time I send data off to a project working on free drivers—I’m hurting you, yep.  So, then, why am I bothering to contribute my time, tell me?  And when people rant but then get offended when you tell them that they’re ranting and to hurry up and get to the point, and they get offended by that? What is that, anyway? "Oh, I’m so thin skinned I can’t even listen to you tell it like it is?" is that what that is? I don’t know.  In case you couldn’t tell by the category, this post is a rant. (though much larger than the rants that are possible on services like identi.ca).

I am going to guess that it is time for me to pick up my book on freedom and start working on it again.  The world needs to be reminded what freedom really is; far too many have too limited a view of what freedom is and only apply it to certain situations, certain circumstances, or certain things.  Or think it is some boundless fountain of infinite choice.  Where are the people that don’t sit at those two extremes‽

And in the meantime, I have to figure out, seriously, why I bother.  My clients want to move to free software stacks, and I am doing so for them over time (gasp! by using their proprietary software to study it, learn about it, and reproduce it—but I suppose that is “harming” the new generation of free software users, too, right?).

What am I missing here?  I don’t know.  I know this: It is late and I am cranky. Night.