Martin Zugec blog

The reason for it is that they dont want to share their ideas with you - because you are representing everything wrong in their eyes. You, as a speaker in Microsoft building = Microsoft :)

According to my experience, open source has two different sides.

The first is practical and technological. I'm writing and using some OSS, because they meet my needs. I generally don't care about their license - it's good that they're free, but it's not the key.

The second side is religious and political. Some people propagate (not necessarily use) open source software as a poilitical and sometimes religious statement.

With the first kind of people you can lead a meaningful discussion. Everything has its own advantages and disadvantages and different points of view may help to both participants.

But you generally cannot hold any sane discussion on political-religious topic, especially when one side actually does not want to discuss.

And that' the main problem here in Czech Republic: most of vocal OSS activists falls into the second group. They usually never wrote any open software or helped it any way. Their "contribution" is by yelling at "Micr$hit".

People who really do something useful in OSS generally do not participate much by local activities, because they are disgusted by these idiots equally as we are.

The view is the same from the other side. Linux community also see the Windows users mass as the bunch of stupid people that run their computers under administrator account, spredding viruses and worms and writing stupid articles to the internet forums. Quite a few people are usable for discussion. It is hard to find a suitable opponent for discussion. On both sides.