I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on the phrase from Matt Asay's piece where he quotes Jason Perlow as saying: "But some people ... will use only fr

I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on the phrase from Matt Asay's piece where he quotes Jason Perlow as saying: "But some people ... will use only free and open source software for the sake of ideological reasons alone" The part I'm curious about is the ending "for the sake of ideological reasons alone." To me, "ideology" refers to the values that drive us-- the reasons we do things. Certainly, Stallman is driven by ideology, but isn't Eric Raymond as well? Aren't we all? I understand that there are non-ideological reasons for things-- like you started crying because you learned your dog had died. You're having an immediate, emotional reaction; there's no rational thought involved. But I don't understand the distinction between "pragmatism" and "ideology" in the realm of rational thought, like choosing software licenses. In my experience, when someone asks me to be "pragmatic," it is the same as someone asking me to do something that seems like a bad idea. They're usually requests like, "Let's just copy a little bit of this code off Sourceforge and act like it's ours. They won't mind. Come on, be pragmatic." Or maybe, "If you would release that code under the BSD license, we could use it in our proprietary commercial applications. Come on, be pragmatic." I'd love it if someone could give me a better way to think about the difference between pragmatism and ideology, or help me understand why I continually disagree with other people about this sort of thing. My best guess is that people who ask me to be "pragmatic" are just full of crap, or at least some of them are, but I'm also open to the possibility that I'm just misunderstanding the world.