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I think OP's generalization that most average technology users don't care one iota about the openness of their tech so long as it 'works' is dead on. Have you

I think OP's generalization that most average technology users don't care one iota about the openness of their tech so long as it 'works' is dead on. Have you honestly had a different experience with non-expert users?

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in. This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts. Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"
- mootothemax 17y ago
  Why isn't "I'm worried my documents won't look right" a legitimate concern? You're talking about something that has a very real effect on people's lives and you're trying to dismiss it because Microsoft Office exists. Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem. End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in. This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts. Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"

mootothemax 17y ago
Why isn't "I'm worried my documents won't look right" a legitimate concern? You're talking about something that has a very real effect on people's lives and you're trying to dismiss it because Microsoft Office exists. Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem. End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.