Essay RFC delayed.

[mark at pc-intouch.com]

On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Richard Stallman wrote:

> But the ideology of business works to discourage this, so in general
> it might be most effective to use Eric's approach with business
> executives, while those of us who want to spread the word about
> freedom focus on the individual users as our audience.

I think that in many cases the individual user's response to free software
ideology is "Well, it sounds nice, but does it *work*?"  IOW, a lot of
people dismiss the ideology not because they disagree with it, but because
they're afraid it won't produce good software.

The application of this to free-software advocacy is that we can use
Eric's approach (which doesn't require any kind of ideological commitment)
to persuade people to use the software and see that it works, after which
they'll be more receptive to the ideology.