** > There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users do

** > There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. < RE: 1 - Yes they do. Look at your little sister/brother/niece/nephew aged 13-18. They want to gossip and flirt on Instagram and take selfies as a way to promote themselves. Their goal is pretty clear-cut -- they want to raise their social stature amongst their peers. People in their 40s know what they want too. With Facebook they can keep in touch with people they knew 20 years ago and kill time at their work playing {whatever replaced Farmville} looking at pictures of {cats or something}. RE: 2 - I agree, but I posit it's really not their job to care. You don't know how the traffic light infrastructure works (presumably) or the logistics of your city's DPW. You just presume concrete will be poured into potholes when appropriate. Very few people actually care how things actually get done; their concern isn't freedom or the subtle politics behind BSD vs GPL2 vs CC w Attribution - their concern is if they can 'drive home without hitting the potholes' (load instagram without the app crashing). -- (That car analogy breaks down due to the fact that you're driving a relatively obscure car manufacturer/make/model. Those alternative and respectable repair shops are staffed with your average joe picking up a spanner used to swapping out Toyota Corolla struts and changing Ford Focus oil. The difference in topology between cars has decreased as a function of time (especially modern cars, which tend to share components - e.g. the '99 Corolla was piece for piece, internally, what a Chevy Prizm had of the same model year). I'm no automotive engineer but I can tinker my way into making anything work (bonus: with a high confidence factor of "this wire loom won't catch on fire"), but Joe-your-friendly-tech is charging 2x-3x more because he has to open a book and invest time in reading data-sheets for something he's not used to working on regularly (then ordering the proper pieces, installing them, and doing things like calibrating the stoich of the carb/adjusting the float, etc that's all taken care of by one of the ~600-800 MCU's in a modern car).