People care about what they already care about / already want.
Most people don't care about open source for its own sake.
Find the things they already care about where open source gives them more of what they already want, with less effort.
Don't try and convince them to care about it, just find things they already care about where the open source version is genuinely better (from their perspective, not yours). Promote it on the merits they already care about (speed, cost, UX), not on the fact that it's open source (only people who already care about open source care about that).
The most vocal part of the opensource community tries to sell opensource as an ideology and that that ideology is correct; the sales pitch is "your ideology is wrong." Most people are perfectly happy with their ideology and are not looking for a new one, certainly not looking to be told it is wrong and insulted.
The community (which is often part of the sales pitch) is a minefield to navigate, you have to put in the time to understand the ideology or face its wrath. The general drama of OSS. Most people have enough drama in their life and find ads and sitting on hold with tech support to be preferable.
OSS puts very little effort into trying to understand what most people want from their software and just keeps trying to offer free alternatives which are more about ideology instead of the software needs of most people.
The community just does not make a good impression on most people so they don't pursue it. With most people I have long since learned to be careful about how I talk about OSS because most people have someone in their life who has been trying to convert them for years and that is what OSS has become to them, that friend or coworker or family member they are very patient with. If you want to change people you have to be willing to be changed by them.
The original reading is that the bad guys are IBM and people who make you type on the command line and learn assembly language and such but if you roll it up to 2025 maybe the bad guys are the drones who have the latest iPhone and iPad and iWatch and AirPods and iPad Pro and Macbook and Mac Studio and Vision Pro and the real liberators write AVR8 assembly for the Arduino.
This is a great question but let’s reverse it: why should they care?
I don’t mean they shouldn’t, but you have to start there.
Consider the things people care about: friends, family, finances, their career, health, hobbies, their local amenities, the avoidance of hassle and, for some, living according to a set of ideals.
Why should they care? What does open source give you?
Hey, appreciate your response! Now, my hn post was actually longer than 4000 and that's why I had to trim otherwise I would've had maybe explained the question but I will try to write a short answer in here.
> Why should they care? What does open source give you?
Open source gives people complete freedom, the freedom that a software can run for posterity, can be modified towards your liking, and the most important thing which I failed to mention: peace of mind
Most open source software can be run with peace of mind. No subscriptions. No update that enshittens it. If it works and you like it, its yours. No spying on you. No showing you ads which will try to radicalize you or sell you some scammy course as an example. Its just there... saying hi to you, saying how's your day, oh you want to use me, fine, how can I help you today.
And it expects nothing back in return. Its just there waiting to be used.
People should care because of this, for peace of mind. its almost always worth it in my opinion. I genuinely think that although I didn't mention but even small steps like using f-droid and then transitioning to linux to then transition to mastodon/bluesky as an example can definitely help reducing the reliance on algorithms as well, it can stop spying on us via using things like signal.
I'd recommend you to check out the clippy movement by louis rousman. I sort of resonate with the same statement and I agree with the right to repair as well, sure I am not much of a hardware tinkering person but the fact that I can go to a mechanic who can repair easily or have an ability to learn it myself via repair friendly systems is always nice to have and I agree with that thing too. I hope that the clippy movement can sort of bring both the things together which I think it already does.
Clippy movement is great actually & explains the reason why people should care, but I have also tried to give some of my own rationale behind it as well.
Personally, the reason I got into open source was because of privacy. I started learning more and more about privacy and uh, the final straw on the camel's back for me was when I learnt valorant was installed kernel level and there's no way you can 100% guarantee its removed without deleting the whole system.
Downloaded linux and kind of never moved back and got into a rabbit hole. (The only time I used windows was in a vm/winboat app to run a tool which could root my phone but that company's otp server didn't work or anything and so my phone can't be rooted but yeah:<)
I like linux but I think that there are so many low hanging fruits like f-droid and signal that people don't even use them man. I would talk about linux/cli tools then when people show the initiative of having f-droid/signal. I think that we need to first educate people about these tools because they are genuinely better than their alternatives and just so good that its almost always worth it to have them on your phone/systems
hmm… I don’t think you’re tying this closely enough to your average person on the street and their daily life. I mean I get your point but it’s very abstract. If you want to convince people, identify a problem they are having. “Peace of mind” only works if they don’t already have that.
Most developers like source code but most people have no use for it.
Most people expect something else from software --- like support and at least a reasonable prospect of continuity and stability in exchange for their investment.
And yes, most people look at software as an investment. Time must be invested even if money is not.
I think trust has a lot to do with it. People might be annoyed about Microsoft pushing OneDrive, streaming service price hikes, or YouTube showing more ads, but they still largely trust Big Tech companies and brands enough to keep using them.
Or maybe they've tried software that was primarily marketed as open source, but because it didn't support some obscure thing, they believe that anything open source is useless.
Yes but something like signal or f-droid just works. I get it. Some open source might be inferior to others because of lack of donation etc. but that doesn't mean that we should basket all of open source because of it.
I think that we should expose more people to the idea of open source through something easier/practical like signal/f-droid/flatpak as I had mentioned in the comment.
Yes it was a little overwhelming in the start for me as well but its soo worth it imo. You feel comfortable with technology of sorts once you go all in, knowing you can always change things to your liking and you have the uttermost freedom, that is truly... liberating.
The true freedom in this day and age. I always appreciated the idea of freedom, the freedom of doing a job that you might like (financial freedom) etc..
Open source software often isn’t preinstalled, may not work flawlessly with many hardware configurations, in general hard to install, often lacks a GUI, has poor UX and UI, and high cognitive load. Also no marketing.
They will be interested when open source devs would prioritize these, but it won't happen
Now I for one like that it doesn't have a gui. I can script with it/tinker it with more.
But lets for the sake of general population agree that yes, most people want a good gui.
So lets go to the operating system that general population has. Android.
Now they can install termux and then go be one of us but then again not gui/cognitive load.
So there is f-droid. Also, its not that hard finding some genuinely cool foss stuff
I wanted a pdf reader on android and I searched open source pdf editor and tried 2-3 and some had poor UX and UI but then I found MJPdf (as an example) https://github.com/mudlej/mj_pdf/ and I found it to be the most superior UI/UX I have seen for a pdf editor.
Same goes for my browser. Zen-browser has the best UI/UX for browser based system. Its just so cool. I love it with Ublock origin.
I can give you some software I can personally vouch for the good UI/UX and compile a list but would that really matter?
I just thought of this idea, also another idea for a good gui is that its kind of hard and requires a language like dart/kotlin which I am not familiar with/ don't actively like (I haven't tried them)
I want to make good android apps in golang but I know I sort of can't make it or its a bunch of hacks/(not worth it?) but there are apps which do that too.
Also I am not sure how you can have marketing for open source apps when the devs sometimes if the app is a service run them at a loss financially and invest their time into it. If we can't expect donations to be made to them, I don't think we can expect this as well, can we?
The incentives system for foss is broken imo but I am not sure how changing it can happen.
The moment you say Linux you immediately eliminate 97% of the population.
When you add f-droid (like that's a completely normal way of naming things) you pretty much ensure that 97% starts thinking about anything else.
I get it, you like OSS. I like it to. But for 97% of people its just completely irrelevant. None of your "advantages" matters to 97% of people.
Let's leave aside for the moment that pretty much all (with a few notable exceptions), OSS software compares terribly to commercial software. Lets ignore that Support for OSS software is
pretty bad.
The biggest reason you can't convince anyone to use OSS is because you clearly believe OSS is good. When an objective person, 97% of whom have never seen a command line interface, or actually installed ANY OS ever take one look and see a big pile of pre-fan supplements.
I say this as someone who makes use of OSS software every day. There is outstanding OSS software available. I could list many great nuggets.
Categorizing software as good or bad based on the license is probably the least useful way to do it. All licenses, commercial or open, cover software that's mostly rubbish, with occasional good offerings. You may as well evangelize red cars as being better than blue cars.
So yeah, stop selling the "license". Nobody cares about the license. If you like Postgres then evangelize that. The license is completely irrelevant.
Might sound elitist but the average person isn’t curious enough to figure this stuff out, and above all else they’re lazy. If it’s not a one click install and does something better than what they’re using, why would they switch?
The average person is fine giving up their data and time in exchange for entertainment and convenience. Free software is good but it comes at the cost of time, you have to learn and be at least semi-competent with a terminal and/or Linux to truly use most FOSS stuff and it’s just beyond the average person. They either don’t have the interest, or don’t have the capability to learn it and for all intents and purposes those are fundamentally equivalent.
Honestly, nothing “bad” has happened to most people as a result of data harvesting. The Equifax breach got a ton of people, including hardcore privacy nerds. There’s just some stuff you can’t turn off to participate in modern society.
100% agree that most people aren't curious about it.
but still, that is why I mentioned some priorities in sharing open source. If I share some niche golang/rust tool, I am sure most people wouldn't care but if I share something like f-droid/signal. I feel like that can help out a lot of people instead.
The result of data harvesting is not a breach. but the whole system that it is right now, for all such data harvesting imo, the most common fraction seems to be hate which gets the most engagement which is why to me most social media feels hateful off the start and why its linked to some of the issues we have right now. Its definitely escalated.
There are some genuine problems in economies all around the world yet if those nations leaders try to scapegoat, trying to create a us vs them, its not a good fix and shit might break and we would all be too invested in watching yt shorts.
What I am advocating with foss is also federation/curated social media with no algorithms but that is the step two imo. The step one to mass adoption for such things might be to have people more familiar/comfortable with open source.
Overall, we need to fight on both fronts if we want change. Both algorithmic and open source apps based. Some open source apps are predatory, they will charge you recurring and hope you forget. Some cheap/quickly built games which can be open source for android for all purposes aren't open source right now and they exploit children's lack of financial knowledge in that sense(scams of sorts).
I think people will create 10$ subscriptions to a local text editor in this world. I just wish instead of people spending those 10$ there or somewhere else, why can't we donate to open source as a society so that the software can be more complete/helpful to even more people and so on and so on...
People care about what they already care about / already want.
Most people don't care about open source for its own sake.
Find the things they already care about where open source gives them more of what they already want, with less effort.
Don't try and convince them to care about it, just find things they already care about where the open source version is genuinely better (from their perspective, not yours). Promote it on the merits they already care about (speed, cost, UX), not on the fact that it's open source (only people who already care about open source care about that).
The most vocal part of the opensource community tries to sell opensource as an ideology and that that ideology is correct; the sales pitch is "your ideology is wrong." Most people are perfectly happy with their ideology and are not looking for a new one, certainly not looking to be told it is wrong and insulted.
The community (which is often part of the sales pitch) is a minefield to navigate, you have to put in the time to understand the ideology or face its wrath. The general drama of OSS. Most people have enough drama in their life and find ads and sitting on hold with tech support to be preferable.
OSS puts very little effort into trying to understand what most people want from their software and just keeps trying to offer free alternatives which are more about ideology instead of the software needs of most people.
The community just does not make a good impression on most people so they don't pursue it. With most people I have long since learned to be careful about how I talk about OSS because most people have someone in their life who has been trying to convert them for years and that is what OSS has become to them, that friend or coworker or family member they are very patient with. If you want to change people you have to be willing to be changed by them.
This '1984' Apple ad shows how Freedom is Slavery to the average Joe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
The original reading is that the bad guys are IBM and people who make you type on the command line and learn assembly language and such but if you roll it up to 2025 maybe the bad guys are the drones who have the latest iPhone and iPad and iWatch and AirPods and iPad Pro and Macbook and Mac Studio and Vision Pro and the real liberators write AVR8 assembly for the Arduino.
And BigBro is Torvalds, Linux kernel devs belong to the Inner Party, Rust is Newspeak etc.. (reality >> fiction in some sense)
We've always been at war with Cupertino
This is a great question but let’s reverse it: why should they care?
I don’t mean they shouldn’t, but you have to start there.
Consider the things people care about: friends, family, finances, their career, health, hobbies, their local amenities, the avoidance of hassle and, for some, living according to a set of ideals.
Why should they care? What does open source give you?
Hey, appreciate your response! Now, my hn post was actually longer than 4000 and that's why I had to trim otherwise I would've had maybe explained the question but I will try to write a short answer in here.
> Why should they care? What does open source give you?
Open source gives people complete freedom, the freedom that a software can run for posterity, can be modified towards your liking, and the most important thing which I failed to mention: peace of mind
Most open source software can be run with peace of mind. No subscriptions. No update that enshittens it. If it works and you like it, its yours. No spying on you. No showing you ads which will try to radicalize you or sell you some scammy course as an example. Its just there... saying hi to you, saying how's your day, oh you want to use me, fine, how can I help you today.
And it expects nothing back in return. Its just there waiting to be used.
People should care because of this, for peace of mind. its almost always worth it in my opinion. I genuinely think that although I didn't mention but even small steps like using f-droid and then transitioning to linux to then transition to mastodon/bluesky as an example can definitely help reducing the reliance on algorithms as well, it can stop spying on us via using things like signal.
I'd recommend you to check out the clippy movement by louis rousman. I sort of resonate with the same statement and I agree with the right to repair as well, sure I am not much of a hardware tinkering person but the fact that I can go to a mechanic who can repair easily or have an ability to learn it myself via repair friendly systems is always nice to have and I agree with that thing too. I hope that the clippy movement can sort of bring both the things together which I think it already does.
Clippy movement is great actually & explains the reason why people should care, but I have also tried to give some of my own rationale behind it as well.
Personally, the reason I got into open source was because of privacy. I started learning more and more about privacy and uh, the final straw on the camel's back for me was when I learnt valorant was installed kernel level and there's no way you can 100% guarantee its removed without deleting the whole system.
Downloaded linux and kind of never moved back and got into a rabbit hole. (The only time I used windows was in a vm/winboat app to run a tool which could root my phone but that company's otp server didn't work or anything and so my phone can't be rooted but yeah:<)
I like linux but I think that there are so many low hanging fruits like f-droid and signal that people don't even use them man. I would talk about linux/cli tools then when people show the initiative of having f-droid/signal. I think that we need to first educate people about these tools because they are genuinely better than their alternatives and just so good that its almost always worth it to have them on your phone/systems
hmm… I don’t think you’re tying this closely enough to your average person on the street and their daily life. I mean I get your point but it’s very abstract. If you want to convince people, identify a problem they are having. “Peace of mind” only works if they don’t already have that.
Most developers like source code but most people have no use for it.
Most people expect something else from software --- like support and at least a reasonable prospect of continuity and stability in exchange for their investment.
And yes, most people look at software as an investment. Time must be invested even if money is not.
I think trust has a lot to do with it. People might be annoyed about Microsoft pushing OneDrive, streaming service price hikes, or YouTube showing more ads, but they still largely trust Big Tech companies and brands enough to keep using them.
Or maybe they've tried software that was primarily marketed as open source, but because it didn't support some obscure thing, they believe that anything open source is useless.
Yes but something like signal or f-droid just works. I get it. Some open source might be inferior to others because of lack of donation etc. but that doesn't mean that we should basket all of open source because of it.
I think that we should expose more people to the idea of open source through something easier/practical like signal/f-droid/flatpak as I had mentioned in the comment.
Yes it was a little overwhelming in the start for me as well but its soo worth it imo. You feel comfortable with technology of sorts once you go all in, knowing you can always change things to your liking and you have the uttermost freedom, that is truly... liberating.
The true freedom in this day and age. I always appreciated the idea of freedom, the freedom of doing a job that you might like (financial freedom) etc..
Open source software often isn’t preinstalled, may not work flawlessly with many hardware configurations, in general hard to install, often lacks a GUI, has poor UX and UI, and high cognitive load. Also no marketing. They will be interested when open source devs would prioritize these, but it won't happen
Okay. I agree.
Now I for one like that it doesn't have a gui. I can script with it/tinker it with more.
But lets for the sake of general population agree that yes, most people want a good gui.
So lets go to the operating system that general population has. Android.
Now they can install termux and then go be one of us but then again not gui/cognitive load.
So there is f-droid. Also, its not that hard finding some genuinely cool foss stuff
I wanted a pdf reader on android and I searched open source pdf editor and tried 2-3 and some had poor UX and UI but then I found MJPdf (as an example) https://github.com/mudlej/mj_pdf/ and I found it to be the most superior UI/UX I have seen for a pdf editor.
Same goes for my browser. Zen-browser has the best UI/UX for browser based system. Its just so cool. I love it with Ublock origin.
I can give you some software I can personally vouch for the good UI/UX and compile a list but would that really matter?
I just thought of this idea, also another idea for a good gui is that its kind of hard and requires a language like dart/kotlin which I am not familiar with/ don't actively like (I haven't tried them)
I want to make good android apps in golang but I know I sort of can't make it or its a bunch of hacks/(not worth it?) but there are apps which do that too.
Also I am not sure how you can have marketing for open source apps when the devs sometimes if the app is a service run them at a loss financially and invest their time into it. If we can't expect donations to be made to them, I don't think we can expect this as well, can we?
The incentives system for foss is broken imo but I am not sure how changing it can happen.
The moment you say Linux you immediately eliminate 97% of the population.
When you add f-droid (like that's a completely normal way of naming things) you pretty much ensure that 97% starts thinking about anything else.
I get it, you like OSS. I like it to. But for 97% of people its just completely irrelevant. None of your "advantages" matters to 97% of people.
Let's leave aside for the moment that pretty much all (with a few notable exceptions), OSS software compares terribly to commercial software. Lets ignore that Support for OSS software is pretty bad.
The biggest reason you can't convince anyone to use OSS is because you clearly believe OSS is good. When an objective person, 97% of whom have never seen a command line interface, or actually installed ANY OS ever take one look and see a big pile of pre-fan supplements.
I say this as someone who makes use of OSS software every day. There is outstanding OSS software available. I could list many great nuggets.
Categorizing software as good or bad based on the license is probably the least useful way to do it. All licenses, commercial or open, cover software that's mostly rubbish, with occasional good offerings. You may as well evangelize red cars as being better than blue cars.
So yeah, stop selling the "license". Nobody cares about the license. If you like Postgres then evangelize that. The license is completely irrelevant.
Might sound elitist but the average person isn’t curious enough to figure this stuff out, and above all else they’re lazy. If it’s not a one click install and does something better than what they’re using, why would they switch?
The average person is fine giving up their data and time in exchange for entertainment and convenience. Free software is good but it comes at the cost of time, you have to learn and be at least semi-competent with a terminal and/or Linux to truly use most FOSS stuff and it’s just beyond the average person. They either don’t have the interest, or don’t have the capability to learn it and for all intents and purposes those are fundamentally equivalent.
Honestly, nothing “bad” has happened to most people as a result of data harvesting. The Equifax breach got a ton of people, including hardcore privacy nerds. There’s just some stuff you can’t turn off to participate in modern society.
100% agree that most people aren't curious about it.
but still, that is why I mentioned some priorities in sharing open source. If I share some niche golang/rust tool, I am sure most people wouldn't care but if I share something like f-droid/signal. I feel like that can help out a lot of people instead.
The result of data harvesting is not a breach. but the whole system that it is right now, for all such data harvesting imo, the most common fraction seems to be hate which gets the most engagement which is why to me most social media feels hateful off the start and why its linked to some of the issues we have right now. Its definitely escalated.
There are some genuine problems in economies all around the world yet if those nations leaders try to scapegoat, trying to create a us vs them, its not a good fix and shit might break and we would all be too invested in watching yt shorts.
What I am advocating with foss is also federation/curated social media with no algorithms but that is the step two imo. The step one to mass adoption for such things might be to have people more familiar/comfortable with open source.
Overall, we need to fight on both fronts if we want change. Both algorithmic and open source apps based. Some open source apps are predatory, they will charge you recurring and hope you forget. Some cheap/quickly built games which can be open source for android for all purposes aren't open source right now and they exploit children's lack of financial knowledge in that sense(scams of sorts).
I think people will create 10$ subscriptions to a local text editor in this world. I just wish instead of people spending those 10$ there or somewhere else, why can't we donate to open source as a society so that the software can be more complete/helpful to even more people and so on and so on...
What are your thoughts?