"The vast majority of real, ordinary users don't really care."
Because they do not understand it and nerds usually suck at communicating with normal people. The result is known: little to no funding and support from the normal world.
In those cases, where it was possible to establish a relationship with the users - the projects worked out and do have funding. Like blender did.
> Because they do not understand it and nerds suck at communicating with normal people. The result is known: little to no funding and support from the normal world.
Agree. Asking a non-techie user about interest in open source won't go anywhere.
But if you frame it in terms like: Do you want your favorite app to lock you in so you can't use any competing apps and then ratchet up the price sky high? Do you want your favorite features removed without recourse? Do you want the company to suddenly discontinue your favorite app and lock you out of using it (and lock you out of your data which you created with it)?
In my experience most regular people first react with "Oh they wouldn't do that", and then after experiencing commercial software for a decade or so eventually realize they all eventually do that.
From there, one can open a discussion to the solution which is open source.
> Do you want your favorite app to lock you in so you can't use any competing apps and then ratchet up the price sky high?
Yes, I want that. Because what I pay for software is so much less than what I make from using that software. Photoshop is not expensive, because the people and organisations who buy it make back that money in two weeks.
Of course I will pay a high price for my favourite app, because I would loose ten times more money by wasting time with open source software that never works properly for the end user and doesn't have any support – unless you are also a developer.
When you buy a car you are usually "locked in" to using the propellant the manufacturer has settled on. Or you can waste almost no money, byt years of your life building a custom car from scrap metal, with a motor that takes any fuel.
But unless you love building cars or love building software, you will want to go for the better, commercial option.
> > Do you want your favorite app to lock you in so you can't use any competing apps and then ratchet up the price sky high?
> Yes, I want that.
I don't quite believe you want that. You'll be willing to pay any amount of money for photoshop no matter how high?
> When you buy a car you are usually "locked in" to using the propellant the manufacturer has settled on.
This analogy shows the opposite. I can buy gas for my car from any number of places, all of them unrelated to he manufacturer.
In fact, the manufacturer can discontinue the car model or can even go out of business entirely and yet I can still continue to buy gas from third parties and continue to use my car.
How do you plan to continue using photoshop of adobe discontinues it? You can't.
> How do you plan to continue using photoshop of adobe discontinues it? You can't.
Double click the app and start it?
Now if you're referring to cloud locks and garbage like that, well that's a risk you take if you decide you're going to use that, just like every single project on github takes the risk that Microsoft doesn't discontinue it. Or every single business that relied on CentOS was taking the risk that RedHat wouldn't discontinue it.
I feel like that's a risk for all software, OSS or not. If the OSS maintainers stop updating your software, it probably stops running on the latest version of your OS at some point. Apple or Microsoft may accelerate that process (Apple almost certainly, Microsoft less so as they're famously very concerned about backwards compatibility).
Obviously there's some software that probably could keep running without updates almost forever, but even for simple things if you're dynamically linked against 32 bit libraries is going to have a hard time on 64 bit OSes if the 32 bit versions of that library aren't available. OSes may add or remove functionality your app relied upon. Heck as long as we're imagining a world where Adobe has decided to stop making photoshop, we could also imagine a world where IPv4 is finally deprecated and removed. How many applications out there assume an IP address is and will always be 4 octets?
Can you give me one example of software that is too expensive for its users? The higher priced software that exists is almost always professional tools, that the user makes money by using.
Open source has many times proved that it doesn't prevent stupid changes in for example UI. Looking at Firefox and them making my most loved features of closing tabs multiple times more effort to do... Because some users can't not hit some menu item...
And I guess this is cycle that has already repeated many times.
>In my experience most regular people first react with "Oh they wouldn't do that", and then after experiencing commercial software for a decade or so eventually realize they all eventually do that.
>From there, one can open a discussion to the solution which is open source.
As long as you keep them away from the apocalyptic discussions about systemd, or pulseaudio, or gnome3 vs gnome 2, or snapd or any of the many other "project has gone in a direction that some people feel very strongly about" kerfluffles that have littered the open source world and lead to many a fork. Or for something bigger than a kerfluffle, you could look at basically anything going on with RedHat / CentOS / Fedora in the past few years. Yes, in theory what happens here is that group B forks from group A and people who preferred A are happy and people who preferred B are also happy. In reality, users suddenly find themselves in the middle of deciding which camp they want to be a part of (especially if the split was over some item they don't care about, like systemd). And if they're really lucky, they'll pick a side that gets continued, ongoing development. If they're not, they pick a side that either gets abandoned by the forkers after their fury cools and the realities of managing the fork set it, or worse they wind up as a small-also-ran, slowly but surely deviating more and more from the "mainline" from which they forked and losing out on all the ancillary benefits that come from being the community de-facto standard/target.
That isn't to say that open source can't have a better degree of protection than proprietary software does. Just that open source by itself is no guarantee, and you might find yourself having to switch software and learn whole new systems just as much as you would if you were using closed source software.
For the absolute vast majority of users who are not developers, open source doesn't mean anything to them because they don't have the knowledge, or the money to deal with the open source software they use making the same arbitrary decisions any other software package might make. Yes, you could take all the source from the last release of CentOS and hire a bunch of developers to keep it going for you... you could also in theory buy all the shares of Microsoft and force them to make windows the way you want it too. The fact that the former is more in the realm of possibility than the latter doesn't make either of them a good plan.
Heck even for developers - if vim decided to start shipping everything you wrote to sketchy AI servers, if Ubuntu decided that all windows will only have maximize buttons and be unclosable without a restart, or if VLC decided to inject ads infront of every locally played video - I may not have the knowledge or skill set to find that and rip it out. Or maybe I just don't have the time because my bills don't get paid by correcting open source projects doing things I find stupid. I can hope other people will do that, but again, now I'm at the mercy of hoping the team of dissatisfied people maintain a fork forever, just like any other uses.
I think that sentence summarizes all your other points.
Of course it's not a guarantee.
One thing that is a guaranteed outcome is that when you rely on proprietary software, you will have zero options when the company that made it goes in a direction you hate. You can't fork it, you can't maintain it, you can't restore the functionality, you can't pay others to fix it; you are guaranteed to be stuck.
Open source keeps your options open. Does not mean it will be necessarily free or effortless, but you'll have options.
> Open source keeps your options open. Does not mean it will be necessarily free or effortless, but you'll have options.
You still have to be able to exercise those options. If you can't, you might as well not have them at all for all the good it will do you, and in the mean time you still have to deal with the fact that your stuff doesn't work now.
Also for what it's worth, you said you frame the argument in the form of:
OSS Advocate: "Do you want your software to change grind puppies into baby food?"
User: "They wouldn't do that"
<Spoiler: They do>
User: <shocked pikachu>
OSS Advocate: "Have you heard the good news about our Lord and Savior RMS?"
But, just because you have options to mitigate the end result doesn't mean that OSS software also won't change to the "grind puppies into baby food" model. That's what the user cares about and OSS does nothing to address that because OSS on its own isn't concerned at all with the the features of the software, just how the software is distributed.
Edit:
And having finally read the linked article in full, I feel like the author is talking about a similar thing. The option to recompile from source to implement the features you want is useless to the user if the user doesn't have the ability or time. And it makes the software less valuable to the user relative to a proprietary version that does have options that they can exercise. Open source is and always has been a developer facing feature in reality and it just so happens that some times (and especially early on) developers were also users. But most users aren't developers anymore and even developers aren't necessarily developers with the skill sets necessary to modify your application anymore. If the goal is to give the USER the freedom to modify the software, then open source on its own might not be enough, or even sufficiently better than the offerings from closed source vendors.
Well, it might start by not tarring other people as "normal" or "ordinary" and separating off "the normal world".
Consider that everybody has a unique life and story, and that each of us are normal (in a statistical sense) in some metrics, and an outlier in others.
The whole "nerd vs normie" thing is just toxic from the word go.
But when it comes to computer use and knowledge, there is a divide between techies and just about everyone else. It's not just about lack of knowledge but also lack of fucks to give. Techies just love to build and configure things to their liking. The rest of us have things to do, and would just rather buy the functionality they need in a ready-to-go and easy-to-use form. This is why when computers meet creative work, except maybe for programming, the best-of-breed professional tools are all proprietary. Nobody in those lines of work gives a shit about source availability. They will endure dark patterns techies find intolerable, just to have that functionality. Hello Adobe subscription model. It's not hard to find a Hackernews who will say "I'd rather pay that $23/month for Photoshop than have to endure GIMP."
Speaking of, the above goes for technical professionals too: sooner or later, many of them will put their college kid tinkering hobbies aside and just buy a Mac, freeing up time they would have spent tinkering with a Linux distro to cook dinner for their spouse or play with their kids.
I used to be like you and believed it was senseless and harmful to believe there was a divide between users and programmers. I was smoking that "any user could become a programmer" copium in my 20s. But there is a divide and it's a wide, wide gulf. One of the things that got me to put the programmer hopium/copium pipe down was getting married. She's very smart, but she buys 100% Apple kit and doesn't have to worry about maintaining or configuring anything after initial purchase.
> Techies just love to build and configure things to their liking.
I don't, and I don't believe I'm even in the minority in that regard. What you are referencing is a stereotype that may reflect a minority of so called "techies", but even those are almost certainly only interested in building and configuring things within some specific field of interest, but still want everything outside of that to "just work".
> The rest of us have things to do, and would just rather buy the functionality they need in a ready-to-go and easy-to-use form.
A false dichotomy that is often repeated, but incorrect nevertheless, for it is the proprietary ecosystem that keeps breaking things over and over again, changing UIs, features, and even very basic settings you've set, dropping support for various things (apps, devices, etc.) you might still use and that still work fine.
My linux installations have made everything work directly out of the box (unlike some properietary systems where you have to install things and fiddle with settings to make things work) and have stayed almost identical in terms of their UI and already-existing features for a decade now (and could have for quite a bit longer if I had adopted linux earlier). No properietary system could come even close to this level of "just works"-ness (though apple probably gets far closer than the others).
In the DAW space, Reaper's success would suggest that the gulf is nowhere nearly as wide as you suggest. This is a supremely "nerdy" DAW, and yet has found great rates of adoption and publicity (partly thanks to its enormously energetic user community).
One of things that is easy to forget if you're not in this world all day every day is that audio engineering was already a pretty nerdy activity before DAWs came along, so the move to computer-based workflows doesn't really change the fundamental psychological qualities of a lot of the process.
Erm, I am fine being considered a freak. But what I am talking about is, that a very high percentage of computer freaks do not go out and talk to people who do not have anything to do with computers. I remember the day I walked into my university and first IT classes and thought, "wow, they actually do live the cliché". I mean, that is fine by me, everyone should live the way they want. But if you want to make an impact beyond your circle of devs, you might want to learn to communicate with people who are happy, that they manage to turn their computer on. Because they are not dumb, they just have other priorities.
> you might want to learn to communicate with people who are happy, that they manage to turn their computer on. Because they are not dumb, they just have other priorities.
Easier said than done. I think many, including myself, would argue that there's more than enough time and energy for it all. People who "have priorities" are simply not curious enough and often stubborn. That's a whole different topic, but definitely worth thinking about.
Your typical "nerd" can balance a diverse set of interests well enough. That's precisely why they're not considered "dumb".
UI/UX is costly. It's not enough to be "good at design", but that a mature API is a prerequisite for frontends that aren't a mess. Most projects never get to that point.
If you really want to make the dichotomy, "nerds" are excellent at communicating if only they didn't have so much to say to so few people. It's really that the "normies" aren't interested. You get them interested by having said so much to so many that something eventually got their attention. You must leverage that they only hear what they want. That's the trick. That tolerance gives you the chance to get to know your audience so you don't bore them, but never stop communicating. Point that firehose to as many audiences as possible. "Normies" have to do this with only a garden hose. Imagine how tough it is to be in sales, but I digress.
You need a lot of observations to figure out what is commonly interesting and what isn't. You have to also accept that the more prolific you are, the more you will have a long tail of useful yet underappreciated ideas.
In other words most "simple" apps are actually full of a ton of features, but they're well placed instead of vomited out to the user. You need both a fully-loaded API and design skills to get there. An immature API leads to weirdness. You'll be putting features front and center that are incomplete or hard to use simply out of guilt.
"It's really that the "normies" aren't interested."
People are interested in things they can control and not be controlled by them. But since "they" do not know about computers - to them a proprietary app they know how to use, is one they feel they can control, opposed to a open source app, they can totally control in theory, but not in reality because they cannot figure out the config, let alone change the source.
In other words, it is how you present it to them. If you can make them understand, that open source can mean that in the end, they can have a app they can really trust and gets the job done - then they will be interested. But if you tell them, they just will have to memorizes those terminal commands, then probably no.
> nerds usually suck at communicating with normal people
Wow, way to buy in to inaccurate, hostile stereotypes. The smart people I know write novels, teach dance, play instruments - and communicate with people.
Oh well, it wasn't supposed to be an insult. Rather a self description. As I am a nerd and do all those things and quite a bit more. I still suck at communicating with normies.
Developer-users are real users. A tool (such as a piece of software) is not just a toy just because it's targeted towards users that actually have the skillset to make proper use of it. In fact, quite the opposite; the most useful tools (in any domain, not just software) are often quite inaccessible to those without the prerequisite expertise. Commercial products may be heavily incentivized to make themselves appeal to even the most inexperienced users, and obtain a much wider userbase as a result, but how many of those users actually do something useful with that, and is the proportion of such users high enough that it would make sense for FOSS developers to target them, instead of their existing more reliably competent userbase?
This is the usual fallacy that assumes users can't either become developers themselves, pay for developers, or wait until some developer cares about their problem and fixes it for free (still way more likely to get results than paying for a support contract with the original developer, and I say that as a contractor).
It doesn't sound like a fallacy to me. You're just extending the statement to also include people who depend on developers in addition to actual developers. It doesn't really change the argument.
I agree with this. On the other hand, the same is true of other things, like the right to free speech: most people don't use it most of the time, but it's critical to have it around anyway. Why would a safeguard lose any validity because most people never use it?
I mean users because I think it's important that people who receive my code can inspect it, especially if a third party has changed it between me and them. I also think they should be able to make their own changes.
You're right, very few care, but it's an important software freedom. Apathy doesn't mean freedom is bad.
Both uses of "users" are valid. Your latter definition probably could use refinement.
I believe what you mean is "people who want to benefit from the technology without understanding or changing it". This is only a subset of users. I think people overindex on these users because they are both vast and a popular monetization target.
This is very true, and I think goes back to the days when it was big news that someone made a C compiler open source - where the users are by definition developers.
The vast majority of real, ordinary *users* don't really care.