A short time ago, a former colleague from Digital Equipment Corporation sent me a message. He wanted to gather a group of "Free Software People" to come and talk to his well-known company about how they could better integrate their code into the Free Software world. The people he wanted to attend included Bdale Garbee, Jim Zemlin, Linus Torvalds, and myself.

I was honored to be included in this gathering of FOSS names, but I questioned whether this was truly a learning experience or a marketing event for his company. After all, just one of these people (any one of them) could have given him a wide range of help in steering his company onto the Free Software path, and even different people might have been more helpful from a technical side. If someone really wanted to understand Free Software and how to work with it, there are also many articles and books available. I dare say there are even many people in his own company that already know about Free Software, how to use it, and how to work with the community in creating more Free Software. He did not need five or six outsiders to come into his company just to tell them how to work with the community on FOSS.

It was at this point, the conversation started to go downhill, and eventually he said the fateful words, "maddog, it is not a religion, it is just a technology."

[...]