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Galileo's battle

The reports of Galileo’s disagreement with the church over Heliocentrism have echoes in today’s Open Source world.

Galileo was faced by a Roman Catholic Church recently blindsided by the Reformation, and the ideas he was upholding were not science, per se (he actually held back on some extra science for church-political reasons based on Pope Urban 7’s reasoning but was not officially rehabilitated until the notorious Benedict 14’s reign), but were in essence a Pagan belief from Aristotle, long officially adopted by Augustine. So what Galileo was gently trying to do was to convince the RCC to adhere to its own official policies — a risky action at the best of times.

As anyone with a whisker of understanding of human nature might guess, this provoked a great deal of internal resentment, and landed Galileo under House Arrest.

So Galileo was aiming to have the Powers That Be start making sense — which is essentially the same as the mission of the Open Source movement, and in particular of the large and moral subset/core/purists known as the Free Software Foundation, personified by Richard Stallman.

FSF seems to be meeting very similar results to what Galileo did: much background acceptance from practical people plus some official indignation and condemnation from figureheads.

What struck me is how totally shorts-first the traditional arguments based on Galileo’s conflict are: Galileo worked to promote the PTB’s official rules as does Free Software Foundation, neither aim to destroy said rules.

I strongly suspect that FSF (and FOSS) would benefit greatly from discovering what strategies worked well for Galileo and deploying those rather than constantly wasting time headbutting the inevitably rising indignation.

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