Being against net neutrality is one of those arguments that on first glance seems reasonable. The power company, after all, charges us more as we consume more electricity--why shouldn't Internet carriers be allowed to charge based on data load and regulate traffic accordingly?

Communities are fundamentally networks of people; people with emotions, passions and insecurities. When we connect these people together, particularly in an online environment, the core of the human condition is laid bare.

Ultimately, “Open Core” is a glorified shareware situation. As a user, you get some subset of functionality, and may even get the four freedoms with regard to that subset. But, when you want the “good stuff”, you've got to take a proprietary license. And, this is true whether the Core is GPL'd or permissively licensed.

Okay so I think we can all agree that proprietary software shouldn't be promoted by the FOSS community. It also seems to be acceptable to promote the use of free software applications on proprietary OSes. So why is there a problem with promoting the use of proprietary applications on free OSes?

Everyone is aware of the huge fuss going on at present. What we have appears to be a conflict between two philosophical viewpoints, fueled by claims that one community is under attack by the other community. This is wrong, and here's why:

"Well it's bound to be popular isn't it?" you'll hear the non-tech savvy say. "Everyone loves something that's free."

"...The first thing we see is that the organization ducks the issue of users' freedom; it uses the term "open source" and does not speak of "free software". These two terms stand for different philosophies which are based on different values: free software's values are freedom and social solidarity, whereas open source cites only practical convenience values such as powerful, reliable software..."

"We're often asked why we don't endorse a particular system—usually a popular GNU/Linux distribution. The short answer to that question is that they don't follow the free system distribution guidelines. But since it isn't always easy to see how a particular system fails to follow the guidelines, we still get these questions.