Can we start calling "evangelism" "sales" again, by the way? Someone who calls themselves an "evangelist" is a salesperson, or someone who studied theology.
- religion: a person who tries to persuade people to become Christians, often by travelling around and organizing religious meetings
- opinions: someone who often talks about how good they think something is, and tries to persuade you to have the same opinion
- religion: one of the writers of the four books in the Bible about Jesus Christ
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/evan...
Is there any logic to this exceptional world?
While both come from religion, an evangelist is not the same thing as a theologian.
You could argue that "sales" just means "I'm trying to sell you on (using|supporting|believing in) this thing", but I think evangelism is a more suitable term in a non-commercial context.
And they buy things. But I agree that marketing would be a better term in many cases.
As far as I can tell I have no "buy things" motivation. I am not trying to get my sister in law to hire me to install and maintain an asterisk phone system or an instance of nextcloud or add a custom feature to vlc etc. Nor do I do those things in general where I would benefit indirectly if more people wanted those services generally.
The OP is referring to the second type I think.
Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, you could have an evangelist job for an open source company selling data protection software/services for example.
This was instrumental in developing desktop publishing industry.
I agree the term is dated and should be retired.