It's funny, whenever spreaders of "embrace extend extinguish" (#EEE) FUD come into my inbox, I tell them that the "extinguish" part of EEE has never worked against open source.
And they almost always reply, "Oh, we don't actually mean 'extinguish'. We mean something else."
Then don't use the word "extinguish" -- because extinguish means extinguish.
If you don't mean "extinguish", then you're clearly moving goal posts. Or worse, you're re-defining a word ("I don't really mean extinguish") to imply something happened when it actually didn't. Don't use the word "extinguish" if that's not what you actually mean.
You're not helping open source by spreading false EEE narratives. You're hurting it.
@atomicpoet eh, I feel it might still be a valid strategy even if it didn't really work completely.
And that it might have not worked completely because people pushed back against it, hard and with purpose.
The fact that something has not worked fully does not mean it's not done damage, and the fact that something did not work fully so far does not mean it cannot work at all.
@rysiek Are attempts at EEE harmful? Of course they are. Nobody denies that.
But they also tend to not work.
Perhaps it might some day work. But if so, why is ActivityPub the rare occasion that it will?
I don’t subscribe to the notion that to get people to care about something, you must make them afraid. If anything, you should make them understand that not only is this fight winnable, you are more likely to win than otherwise.
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