Re: [Fsuk-manchester] "Selling" Free software to the masses

[Robert Burrell Donkin]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Iain Roberts <address@hidden> wrote:
> Having spent a good chunk of the last few year promoting free & open source, 
> and working with other doing the same, I'm afraid I'm not too optimistic 
> about the ability of the four
> freedoms and the philsophy behind free software to appeal to a wider audience.

depends on the audience: Gen Y and millenials are much more clueful on tech :-)

> Remember - GNU/Linux has been around for over 20 years now and every year 
> since about 2002 has been "the year of the Linux desktop", but the Linux 
> market share remain stubbornly
> tiny, depite the efforts of tens of thousands of enthusiasts.  Compare and 
> contrast with the success of the proprietary iPhone and its 200,000 tightly 
> controlled apps.

there's an app for that ;-)

the iPhone is the moment when geek became sexy and this opens many doors :-)

iPhone places a general purpose computer placed in the hands of the
people. the main competitor will be Android which be forced to become
more open to offer a competitive difference to iPhone. when ARM starts
shipping 32 or 64 core processors for Android phones in the
early-2010s, the fun really starts :-)

> The 4 freedoms mean little to modern, non-technical users.  They don't want 
> to know how the software works, or change it.  If they want to share any 
> software with someone else,
> they'll give them the URL or torrent to download it.  And, in practise, they 
> can normally do what they want with proprietary software.

times change :-)

free (as in beer) software is ubiquitous in Gen Y and this liberty has
become ingrained. but anyone who's read the
ok-let's-just-kill-the-internet bill will realise that the state is
now very serious about enforcing copyright (even if this means forcing
IT offshore and closing the internet). as freedom is taken from Gen Y,
they will learn about liberty. so this is a good time for the Free
Software movement to start preaching.

> Mark make an interesting point about DRM and other restrictions.  To some 
> extent that's true but - in practise - most people find the opposite: there 
> are far more things that they want
> to do but can't in *free* software because it doesn't have the functionality.

not sure that's true any more. FOSS is like a pyramid. ATM FOSS
libraries have more functionality but it's not really fed upwards into
superior desktop applications yet. it's just a matter of time...

> I defy anyone who's used the latest versions of MS Office to seriously claim 
> that OpenOffice.org is as good (though it may be good enough for their needs, 
> as it is for mine).

<ducks>open office is closed software given a Free license</ducks>

> Likewise, free software for editing movies and doing DTP is clearly and often 
> painfully inferior to the better proprietary alternatives.

depends on how much you're willing to pay. if you have a few thousands
pounds then that's true. i'm not sure where the price boundary is
these days - i suspect it's around the hundred pound mark but i'm not
an expert on this stuff....

> And isn't so much of this software running on our PCs so old-fashioned 
> anyway, when so many apps are web based (and free as in beer)?

lock in is easy to explain and Gen Y understand this concept well

it's about liberty - can a corporation hold you to ransom?

> To promote free software, I would concentrate on the free apps that genuinely 
> offer something either better than the proprietary alternatives (e.g. 
> Firefox) or that you couldn't legally
> improve without paying a significant amount of money (e.g. Gimp, Inkscape).  
> Ubuntu's also worth a punt.
>
> They're (relatively) widely used, look good, have lots of handy plug-ins, big 
> user support communities and do the job well enough for most people's needs.  
> And, of course, they can be
> legally obtained free of charge.

<ducks>that's the open source argument - the open source method is
better and so copyleft isn't needed</ducks>

the wheel turns and every sign so far is that it's going to be a great
decade :-)

open source won the 00's. maybe free software will be the big winner
of the '10s. the fundamental free software argument that people should
be at liberty to tinker with their machines is still a powerful
message and relevant once again as computation power is placed in the
palms of the public.

- robert