My question is simple. Why are people uneducated about foss and how to really change that.
I have thought about what might be the best way to spread the word about foss and it seems that the best way is via advocating things like f-droid and linux mate/flatpak/ making things so simple that there is no reason why not.
Yet then I think that the reason why people are still not interested is that it becomes too boring.
Am I really in control if all my moves are being tracked. I am not sure. Do people not know this?
I want to raise awareness about oss since its something I am passionate about. Yet I can't seem to know how. I feel heard talking about these issues, its so easy convincing people sometimes to use signal yet they still don't have it. Its mixed bag.
I feel like my generation has left me a lot more too, we have stopped even questioning it and we are all so polarized by algorithms tracking us all.
I feel like in a world of such polarization, using open source can help to slowly raise awareness about it so that we can then move away from extreme privacy invasise ragebaits inducing algorithms to something better, so that then we can lessen our senses and stop with oh its the end of all and nothing matters nihilism or yeah who cares kind of idea.
Sometimes I feel like my ideas don't matter, maybe you could say things like youtube are a mic for people like my ideas but its not. I don't want to create any lore about me, I just want to tell people about stupid simple foss things like f-droid and leave in my opinion so that I could then work on/help other pressing issues in open source.
People also feel entitled to good quality open source software, like if that's what you expect, either be so kind to thank the developer and kindly ask them an solution or join their community and kindly ask there or maybe donate to them/contribute to it yourselves. I see people who are entitled and its :/
I thank every open source developer, its like something so elegant to me, we can have forks and so many other things and we all learn from each other and its sometimes refreshing. Yet it saddens me that it doesn't receive donations, that people don't use it, that people feel entitled sometimes asking for a feature.
This rabbit hole is so deep but if we want to share it with the masses, then we need to discuss the priorities of what to share and what not to for begineers. We need a genuine wiki to get started into the open source lifestyle. I don't know how I started, maybe by just using linux and then searching for any software and writing alternativeto X open source something and so many other things...
Awesome-privacy helped me out a ton in the beginning as well. I actually read it whole and privacyguides.net and so many others, there are so many good guides yet they still don't get attention.
So should people create another guide to split the attention even more or should they actually redirect attention to lists which we might discuss is good enough for everyone. I have so many questions.
We can have better things and that gives me hope. But the problem is that, it doesn't require myself to change but the world in the process a little as well and that confuses me.
Do I have the power to change the world in this direction or not? Do any one of us have it? I feel small in this system yet I know giving hope would be mixed too. I don't want to be sad for something out of my control, but that is the question, is this thing out of our control or not? I feel like I don't know its answer. I just don't know which is why I am asking here. But I still want to be hopeful y'know.
Have a nice day and looking forward to each and every one of your comments!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
The original reading is that the bad guys are IBM and people who make you type on the command line and learn assembly language and such but if you roll it up to 2025 maybe the bad guys are the drones who have the latest iPhone and iPad and iWatch and AirPods and iPad Pro and Macbook and Mac Studio and Vision Pro and the real liberators write AVR8 assembly for the Arduino.
Or maybe they've tried software that was primarily marketed as open source, but because it didn't support some obscure thing, they believe that anything open source is useless.
The average person is fine giving up their data and time in exchange for entertainment and convenience. Free software is good but it comes at the cost of time, you have to learn and be at least semi-competent with a terminal and/or Linux to truly use most FOSS stuff and it’s just beyond the average person. They either don’t have the interest, or don’t have the capability to learn it and for all intents and purposes those are fundamentally equivalent.
Honestly, nothing “bad” has happened to most people as a result of data harvesting. The Equifax breach got a ton of people, including hardcore privacy nerds. There’s just some stuff you can’t turn off to participate in modern society.
Most people don't care about open source for its own sake.
Find the things they already care about where open source gives them more of what they already want, with less effort.
Don't try and convince them to care about it, just find things they already care about where the open source version is genuinely better (from their perspective, not yours). Promote it on the merits they already care about (speed, cost, UX), not on the fact that it's open source (only people who already care about open source care about that).
I don’t mean they shouldn’t, but you have to start there.
Consider the things people care about: friends, family, finances, their career, health, hobbies, their local amenities, the avoidance of hassle and, for some, living according to a set of ideals.
Why should they care? What does open source give you?
The community (which is often part of the sales pitch) is a minefield to navigate, you have to put in the time to understand the ideology or face its wrath. The general drama of OSS. Most people have enough drama in their life and find ads and sitting on hold with tech support to be preferable.
OSS puts very little effort into trying to understand what most people want from their software and just keeps trying to offer free alternatives which are more about ideology instead of the software needs of most people.
The community just does not make a good impression on most people so they don't pursue it. With most people I have long since learned to be careful about how I talk about OSS because most people have someone in their life who has been trying to convert them for years and that is what OSS has become to them, that friend or coworker or family member they are very patient with. If you want to change people you have to be willing to be changed by them.
Most people expect something else from software --- like support and at least a reasonable prospect of continuity and stability in exchange for their investment.
And yes, most people look at software as an investment. Time must be invested even if money is not.
When you add f-droid (like that's a completely normal way of naming things) you pretty much ensure that 97% starts thinking about anything else.
I get it, you like OSS. I like it to. But for 97% of people its just completely irrelevant. None of your "advantages" matters to 97% of people.
Let's leave aside for the moment that pretty much all (with a few notable exceptions), OSS software compares terribly to commercial software. Lets ignore that Support for OSS software is pretty bad.
The biggest reason you can't convince anyone to use OSS is because you clearly believe OSS is good. When an objective person, 97% of whom have never seen a command line interface, or actually installed ANY OS ever take one look and see a big pile of pre-fan supplements.
I say this as someone who makes use of OSS software every day. There is outstanding OSS software available. I could list many great nuggets.
Categorizing software as good or bad based on the license is probably the least useful way to do it. All licenses, commercial or open, cover software that's mostly rubbish, with occasional good offerings. You may as well evangelize red cars as being better than blue cars.
So yeah, stop selling the "license". Nobody cares about the license. If you like Postgres then evangelize that. The license is completely irrelevant.
I have to use software to do the things I want to do. I pick an option that’s good enough, use it, and go about my day.
Fiddling with and thinking about software isn’t a hobby I want any part of.
It feels like you’re asking why people don’t care about their forks and spoons. It’s the food they care about!