When it comes to choice, we are often taught that whatever we choose won’t make us feel better, it will make us feel worse and we have to choose one. But this is an oversimplification and even the choice of saying “no” to something can lead to regret later.
I am one of those people who get sad when I am asked to say no to an idea or a decision. It can be so easy to get caught up in the “what if”. It could simply mean that we were given a choice, but it could also be that we were told no and we chose not to.
For example, before I became a blogger, I used to be a very hard-line Christian. I was very passionate about the idea that all Christians should be the same, that all Christians should be equal. But I was also very passionate about some other things. For example, a former pastor once told me that if I had known who the real Jesus was, I probably would have killed him.
This is not a hard and fast rule, but it does seem as if the Debian team decided to avoid the whole Jesus thing. That’s pretty much because we don’t know if Jesus actually existed. But, as a blogger, I’ve been a bit of a no-statement stallman in the past. I’ve also been very outspoken in the past about my views on religion and political issues, so I guess my views on Jesus are a bit more relaxed.
Stallman is a bit of a no-statement stallman. He also believes that it is important to be as open as possible about what you believe/support in your blog, and that it’s not necessary to have an expert to back you up. The Debian team doesn’t seem to get that.
I find Stallman’s approach to blogging really annoying. He seems to want everyone to feel comfortable enough to do what he wants, rather than to feel comfortable enough to say what he wants to say. He also wants to be sure that if he wants to say something, he will be able to say it in ways that will not make it into the blog. This is very very wrong.
So, to recap: Stallman is a man who works with people all the time. One of my clients, an e-commerce site, asked me to write a blog post about how I use Debian to run my e-commerce site. He wanted me to say that I don’t use Debian because it’s not used by people who use e-commerce sites, and because he’s not sure whether or not Stallman is right.
Yes, Stallman is right. Debian is used by a lot of people who use e-commerce sites. However, the blog post would have been better off being written by someone who uses Debian on a regular basis. And if someone who uses Debian would have written it, it would have been much better.
Debian is a great choice for e-commerce sites, but Debian is not a suitable choice for Stallman to run his own site. There are hundreds of thousands of people on the Debian community, and if Stallman wanted to run a site he would need to find a way to get his site listed on the Debian.org. There are even more people on the Debian.
It appears that Debian is not a suitable choice for Stallman to run his own site. It is a good choice for e-commerce sites, but a bad choice for a site like his own. If Debian were the site, it would mean that there would be no way to get his site on Debian.org because there are too many people on the Debian community. So Stallman would have to build his site from scratch. He would probably also need to use a site like www.debian.
