Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/06/01/holly-ross-nten.html

[ This post was not actually placed here until 2011-11-16, but I’ve put it
in proper sequence with when the bulk of it was written. (Some of you may
find it new in your RSS feeds as of 2011-11-16, however.) I originally
posted it as a comment on an NTEN Blog post. NTEN got really sneaky over
the years after I posted this comment. First, somewhere in late 2011, they
removed the comments from the blog post which originally appeared on their
website. Then, in August 2015, after I
found
an archive.org link that showed the original article, they seem to have
made sure
the original content was removed from archive.org (which a website owner is
technically allowed to do, although it’s sneaky behavior).

I don’t have the full text of Holly Ross’ blog post, and it appears
impossible to find online — NTEN and Holly have done an excellent job
of rewriting history and pretending that they didn’t originally hold an
anti-software-freedom position. I suspect, though, given their
historically close ties to proprietary software companies, that NTEN
remains unfriendly to software freedom, even if they eventually made the
URL of Holly Ross’ blog post redirect to a seemingly-pro-FOSS propaganda
page. Holly Ross, who later was the Executive Director of the Drupal
Association, has never, to my knowledge, apologized for her comments nor
responded to mine.

My original post from 2011-11-16 follows:

In May
2009, Holly
Ross, NTEN’s Executive Director attacked software freedom, arguing that:

Open Source is Dead. … The code was free, but we paid tens of
thousands of dollars to get our implementation up and running. … I
try to use solutions that reflect our values as an organization, but at
the end of the day, I just need it to work. Community support can be
great, but you’re no less beholden to the whims of the community for
support and updates than you are to any paid vendor.…

open source code isn’t necessarily any better than proprietary
code. The costs, in time and money, are just placed elsewhere. It’s a
difference in how we budget for software more than anything else. So, the
old arguments for open source software adoption are dead to
me.…

[Open Source and Free Software] is great to have as options. I just don’t
accept the argument that we have to support them simply because the code
is available to everybody.

— Holly Ross, 2009-05-28

First of all, Holly completely confuses free as in freedom and free as
in price even while she’s attempting to indicate she
understands that there are “values” involved. But more to
the point, she shuns software freedom as a social justice cause. This
led me to write the following response at the time, that NTEN ultimately
deleted from their website:

The software freedom movement started primarily as an effort for
social justice for programmers and users. The goal is to avoid the
helplessness and lock-in that proprietary software demands, and to
treat users and developers equally in freedom.

Perhaps there was a time (hopefully now long ago) when non-profits
that focused on non-environmental issues would say things like “there’s
a place for non-recycled paper; it looks nicer and is cheaper”. I
doubt any non-profit would say that now to their colleagues in the
environmental movement. Yet, it’s common for non-profit leaders
outside of the FLOSS world to say that the issue of software freedom is
not relevant and that they need not consider the ethical and moral
implications of software choices in the way that they do with their
choices about what paper to buy.

I’m curious, Holly, if you had said “recycled paper isn’t
necessarily better than virgin tree paper”, what reaction would
you expect from the environmental non-profits? Indeed, would you think
it’s appropriate for a non-profit to refuse to recycle because their
geographical area charges more for it? I guess you wouldn’t think
that’s appropriate, and I am left wondering why you feel that your
colleagues in the software freedom movement simply don’t deserve the
same respect as those in the environmental movement.

I have hoped for a long time that this attitude would change, and I
will continue to hope. I am sad to see that it hasn’t change yet, at
least at NTEN.

— Bradley M. Kuhn, 2009-06-01

Note that Holly never responded to me. I am
again left wondering; if someone from a respected environmental movement
organization had pointed out one of her blog posts was anti-recycling,
would she have bothered to respond?