There is a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, describing the stages of
establishment resistence to a winning strategy of nonviolent activism, that
partisans of open source and especially
Linux have embraced as almost an explanatory framework
for the behaviors they observe while trying to get corporations and other
large institutions to take new ways of doing things seriously:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win.
In hacker usage this quote has miscegenated with the U.S military's
DefCon
terminology describing ‘defense conditions’ or degrees of war
alert. At GandhiCon One, you're being ignored. At GandhiCon Two,
opponents are laughing at you and dismissing the idea that you could ever
be a threat. At GandhiCon Three, they're fighting you on the merits and/or
attempting to discredit you. At GandhiCon Four, you're winning and they
are arguing to save face or stave off complete collapse of their
position.
