A common theme I’m noticing between today’s #Outreachy and yesterday’s #RightToRepair keynotes at #FOSSY: #FOSS is great, but if we don’t commit to actually helping people access it, it’s not useful.
Simply chastising people for using proprietary software, will not somehow force them to re-evaluate their choices and come onboard.
If the UX is bad, if it isn’t obvious how to use the FOSS tools to achieve the desired outcomes, they won’t get used.
Along the same axis, Emily’s talk on Positioning (https://2023.fossy.us/schedule/presentation/24/) made the distinction that being FOSS is a project attribute, not a value.
In other (my) words, the point is: Whilst some of us have the privilege of being picky, for most people out there, the concept of software licensing is entirely irrelevant.
How many of us care if the hammer at the hardware store was die-cast or hand-smithed?
If we don’t understand their perspective, we won’t reach the people who need us most.
@philip This is something I picked up on quickly and have been talking about since I got more involved with #FOSS.
FOSS things are often not easily accessible by the average user. People often don't know it exists, and if they do, it's not nearly as straight forward or as easily accessed as mainstream, proprietary counterparts. Who's going to use LibreOffice when Microsoft Office is easier to find and get?
Moreover, while FOSS doesn't have a price in terms of money, it does have a price when it comes to trade offs. FOSS software can often lack features that people have to have to do their work at the same level of quality. And in terms of FOSS social media such as the #fediverse, these platforms are often smaller, meaning content creators have to not only move to a smaller audience, there's also no algorithm to help boost their content to a wider audience.
Scorning people for using proprietary software is insensitive to the needs of the people using it and ultimately hurts FOSS by making us lose support
@philip On top of making FOSS easier to access, I think that we would see much, much more people switch over if they start seeing features that they want/need being added to FOSS software.
#Valve proved this by designing #poton. Once gamers could play the vast majority of their games with not just decent, but more often fantastic performance, suddenly a massive barrier to adopting #linux was broken for a large audience.
At the end of the day, if FOSS is unable to provide what these users need, how can any of us blame them for not wanting to switch? But I do think that FOSS is getting better about becoming more accessible to the average user, and I hope this trend continues.
Issen
Philip Mallegol-Hansen
Daedalous Eros