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Tech people don't have this attitude, users do. Have you ever tried to teach someone who wasn't already enthusiastic about tech? Do you really think most users

Tech people don't have this attitude, users do. Have you ever tried to teach someone who wasn't already enthusiastic about tech? Do you really think most users actually care? Since the beginning of the tech industry, users have been presented over and over again with choices of closed and open tech, centralized and decentralized platforms, and each time users have overwhelmingly chosen the more convenient closed & centralized options. Most people just want to use tech like an appliance that benefits their lives, not teach themselves to manage or understand it. Driving is an apt analogy because the overwhelming majority of people have no idea how to maintain or extend or tinker with their vehicle, nor do they want to learn. They just want to steer their car towards a location much like computer users want to steer their phones to a video or article or profile. Some minimal skill is currently necessary for driving, but even that's going away. Soon, cars will drive themselves and the automobile will finally be as convenient as a phone. Kill everyone in tech right now then reset the clock, and in 30 years you'll have exactly the same industry. There's no tech Illuminati trying to crush general computing, general computing just stopped being necessary.

mwcampbell 6y ago
Maybe our best hope is to get more children enthusiastic enough about programming that they won't want the locked-down devices that Big Tech is selling.
vegetablepotpie 6y ago
I have to agree with you themacguffinman, for years I tried getting my mom to use Linux, but it never stuck. One year for Mother’s Day I got her an iPad and she’s been happy with it and I rarely get tech support calls. Although computers are a great innovation and the human mind is powerful I think that the abstract thinking required to use computers to their full potential isn’t distributed across the human population evenly. There are so many problems that can’t be solved with computers either. Before you used to have a separate device for every activity in your life. Phone, video camera, scrap book, magazine etc. Now all those functions those items did can be rolled into one device. My mom can’t handle that her iPad is something more than a camera/Facebook machine. She asked me to delete Pages, the word processor that came with it, because she never uses it. I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  > I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with. TO expand on my other comment on this thread, I think what we need to do is train the next generation to handle and demand more, rather than lock them into appliances based on what the older generations supposedly can't handle. Maybe we need to look to historic systems like Lisp machines, NLS (the subject of Engelbart's "mother of all demos"), or the original PARC Smalltalk system to recapture a more ambitious vision for personal computers, from before Apple decided that they should be appliances.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The free software “industry” and its enthusiasts should realise and accept that IT is a tool and not a lifestyle for many people. This includes me despite being a developer and somewhat of a tech enthusiast - a decade ago I had plenty of time to tinker around with a custom Linux installation, nowadays I just run macOS and call it a day. Software that doesn’t infringe on your freedoms is great, but functionality and user experience is important. A big reason why proprietary and increasingly user-hostile software won is because it works well enough (despite the hostility) for the majority of people.
- the_af 6y ago
  Functionality is fine and dandy till you get blocked out of the software or get your content deleted, or told you cannot share it with your friends. Then you'll care about freedom.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    In a lot of cases there are no comparable free alternatives to proprietary products, so the comparison is not "perpetual functionality vs time-limited/restricted functionality", it's more like "no functionality at all vs restricted functionality", and in this case, restricted functionality is still the more pragmatic choice. To expand on my earlier comment, my point was that free software will not succeed until it competes with proprietary software on user experience and functionality, and the only way to compete is to focus their (limited resources) where it matters instead of making yet another distro, desktop environment or init system.
    - the_af 6y ago
      Pragmatism is short sighted though. Don't exchange convenience now, with shackles, for freedom later on. In any case, not being able to install whatever he wants, or being forbidden from sharing things with friends because of DRM is a very immediate limitation even Joe Average will notice and complain about -- unless we, the people who know better, "train" him to accept this is the way things are and there's nothing to be done about it. And we really, really shouldn't do this. As for your second point, two thoughts: - Free software has already succeeded. The tech world we live in couldn't exist without it. If you work with computers, your job likely wouldn't exist without free software -- or if it existed, you wouldn't recognize it or want to work in it. - There's a lot already said, by better thinkers than you and me, about quality vs freedom. Because free/libre software is a philosophical point of view, quality comes after, not before freedom. This is precisely the kind of thing people like RMS pointed out about the differences between libre and merely "open source" software. Please consider what better thinkers have already said in battles already waged decades ago before rehashing the same arguments.
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
If the open options had the same level of marketing behind them that the closed ones do, you might have an argument that users prefer the closed options.

mwcampbell 6y ago

Maybe our best hope is to get more children enthusiastic enough about programming that they won't want the locked-down devices that Big Tech is selling.

vegetablepotpie 6y ago

I have to agree with you themacguffinman, for years I tried getting my mom to use Linux, but it never stuck. One year for Mother’s Day I got her an iPad and she’s been happy with it and I rarely get tech support calls. Although computers are a great innovation and the human mind is powerful I think that the abstract thinking required to use computers to their full potential isn’t distributed across the human population evenly. There are so many problems that can’t be solved with computers either. Before you used to have a separate device for every activity in your life. Phone, video camera, scrap book, magazine etc. Now all those functions those items did can be rolled into one device. My mom can’t handle that her iPad is something more than a camera/Facebook machine. She asked me to delete Pages, the word processor that came with it, because she never uses it. I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with.

mwcampbell 6y ago
> I think most people just want appliances. That’s what their minds can handle and that’s what the market responds with. TO expand on my other comment on this thread, I think what we need to do is train the next generation to handle and demand more, rather than lock them into appliances based on what the older generations supposedly can't handle. Maybe we need to look to historic systems like Lisp machines, NLS (the subject of Engelbart's "mother of all demos"), or the original PARC Smalltalk system to recapture a more ambitious vision for personal computers, from before Apple decided that they should be appliances.

Nextgrid 6y ago

The free software “industry” and its enthusiasts should realise and accept that IT is a tool and not a lifestyle for many people. This includes me despite being a developer and somewhat of a tech enthusiast - a decade ago I had plenty of time to tinker around with a custom Linux installation, nowadays I just run macOS and call it a day. Software that doesn’t infringe on your freedoms is great, but functionality and user experience is important. A big reason why proprietary and increasingly user-hostile software won is because it works well enough (despite the hostility) for the majority of people.

the_af 6y ago
Functionality is fine and dandy till you get blocked out of the software or get your content deleted, or told you cannot share it with your friends. Then you'll care about freedom.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  In a lot of cases there are no comparable free alternatives to proprietary products, so the comparison is not "perpetual functionality vs time-limited/restricted functionality", it's more like "no functionality at all vs restricted functionality", and in this case, restricted functionality is still the more pragmatic choice. To expand on my earlier comment, my point was that free software will not succeed until it competes with proprietary software on user experience and functionality, and the only way to compete is to focus their (limited resources) where it matters instead of making yet another distro, desktop environment or init system.
  - the_af 6y ago
    Pragmatism is short sighted though. Don't exchange convenience now, with shackles, for freedom later on. In any case, not being able to install whatever he wants, or being forbidden from sharing things with friends because of DRM is a very immediate limitation even Joe Average will notice and complain about -- unless we, the people who know better, "train" him to accept this is the way things are and there's nothing to be done about it. And we really, really shouldn't do this. As for your second point, two thoughts: - Free software has already succeeded. The tech world we live in couldn't exist without it. If you work with computers, your job likely wouldn't exist without free software -- or if it existed, you wouldn't recognize it or want to work in it. - There's a lot already said, by better thinkers than you and me, about quality vs freedom. Because free/libre software is a philosophical point of view, quality comes after, not before freedom. This is precisely the kind of thing people like RMS pointed out about the differences between libre and merely "open source" software. Please consider what better thinkers have already said in battles already waged decades ago before rehashing the same arguments.

TheCoelacanth 6y ago

If the open options had the same level of marketing behind them that the closed ones do, you might have an argument that users prefer the closed options.