Hey Zealousy - Reprise

As I was going through my Inbox, I spotted a comment to my blog that seems especially connected to my last post. Apparently, last week, I was indirectly "Digg"'d (Dug?) when someone wrote about the OpenOffice ads and linked to my post from February. Well, the post was writted tongue-in-cheek, but I apparently upset a few people. Some blogged about it and kept an even temper about it, but one person was especially angered. He also called me a wimp for turning off comments. Truth is, comments are on, but I actually turn them off automatically after 90 days to avoid spam and that was a 5 month old post. But, to address this person's thoughts that I am not willing to present the opposing view, here is his rebuttal in its entirety:

you have the (guts) to post anti opensource, and anti amd comments, yet you do not have the (guts) to allow for people to comment? Hrrrm...seems like you need to grow a pair and quit being a fanboy for 'ol bill, he deserves no admiration. I think that it is nice that another company will stand up to your monopoly. Mikerowesoft uses its considerable market share, and money to prevent startups with better ideas from bringing their products to the market place. Either that or you lazy developers steal open source ideas that were stealing market share from your man bill. It is nice to see that to remain competative with open office the beta of office 2k7 steals some of the very features that make open office so popular.

--jrod 

Note that I did edit and used the word "guts" as a substitute for a crude reference to my manhood. Otherwise, his post is completely intact as I received it. Well, I hope this somehow displays "guts". So, here's the quesiton: how useful this argument is to support open source alternatives? He makes it personal against Bill Gates, refers to the irrelevant issue we had with the gentleman named Mike Rowe who made a witty nameplay on his name to sound like Microsoft, and he implies that our developers are lazy. I've worked next door to the Office devs for years and I don't think lazy is the word that comes to mind when I watch them in action. Oh, and I didn't make anti-AMD comments--I was picking on Sun for bagging SPARC and going x86 with their Cobalt servers. Actually, it's kind of a compliment to AMD. And when it comes to an anti-open source route, there are better targets than one of the guys working with the CodePlex team.

Anyway, to "jrod", I thank you for your message. You've neatly support my theories on customer evangelists. Your mind is clearly made up and I am sure you will do your best to change other people's opinions. Good luck...