[QD-Filosofia] The futility of arguing with paid advocates

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/02/1553218

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The futility of arguing with paid advocates
Wednesday September 08, 2004 (03:48 PM GMT)
By: Robin 'Roblimo' Miller

(...) Ideally, you speak to the audience while the paid proprietary advocate 
speaks to you. If your opponent puts out a full-out lie like the, "College 
student Linus Torvalds couldn't possibly have written Linux from scratch," 
line some of the FUD-people are putting out these days, you don't refute 
this point eye-to-eye, but look at the audience and say, perhaps with a bit 
of sadness in your voice, "We all know better than to believe this canard, 
don't we?" Then, immediately, move on and point out an advantage of Linux 
and open source. (...)

The people who are important to us -- and with whom we want to make eye 
contact -- are the audience members. They -- not the paid advocates -- are 
the ones who decide whether or not they or their organizations are going to 
use free or open source software. Even if they are locked into proprietary 
software today, if we open their minds to the positive potential of open 
source and get them thinking about it, we have been successful Linux 
advocates no matter how much FUD we must brush out of the way to achieve 
that goal.