2009-Jul-6 Update: Upon personal request from the author I have removed the cached copies, and am just quoting the body of the article here, without links and personal identification.

This is a rough situation – on the one hand the original posting was incredibly ignorant and offensive and fully deserved harsh criticism, but on the other hand he doesn’t come across as a bad guy, just had a bad day and made one hell of a judgment error in a blog post.

2009-Jul-6 Updated thoughts:

The author sent me a few emails and I sympathize with his position and I have removed all cached copies and identifying information, for what good that will do. I don’t want to beat the hell out of the guy – he comes across as decent enough- so it’s probably best to leave it there.

There’s a deep, deep problem in our community where intelligent, talented developers think it’s acceptable or even admirable to viciously and personally attack the single individual most responsible for the very concept of Free and Open Source software. I’m not saying you have to worship or even agree with rms – hell, I don’t agree with him on lots of things my damn self – but the level of personal ridicule and attack because he made a reasonable statement about your pet project is absolutely vile. I don’t think I can express how disgusting I think it is without resorting to language and speech that would sink me to that level, so that’s another thing best left here, I guess.

Here’s something to think about to put things in context:

The Free and Open Source movement will last as long as we use computing devices. rms started that. That’s him, the idealist.

Mono will be lucky to even exist in 15 years. That’s you, the “pragmatist”.

That’s the difference between idealism and pragmatism. One pays off today. One pays off forever.