Promoting FOSS to People Who Don't Care

MarcoF brings us his take on how to cultivate interest in open-source software to casual users who aren't interested in or necessarily aware of its existence. Many people simply have trouble leaving their comfort zone of older proprietary software; what's the best way to get them to look at an open-source alternative? "Since most people would rather die than write or study software source code, it is actually counterproductive to promote software 'because you can modify it yourself and be part of its community'. Look for really practical advantages which can be enjoyed every day by the person you want to convince. Start from the actual deep passions, beliefs, interests and practical needs of the people in front of you and go backwards from there, delaying the apparition of terms like 'source code', 'the four software freedoms', GPL, Gnu, Linux, etc."

Comments

Re:Lead by Example

[Tom]

Nope.

I like Apple for two reasons:

One, they play fair with standards and open protocolls. They don't invent their own crap or "extend" existing stuff, they use standards wherever it makes sense, so interoperability is usually easy. So Apple might not be a Free Software company, but they are Free-Software-friendly.

Two, they know about design and I'm simply more productive with a machine that works for me instead of one that I have to continually beat into submission (windos) or continually tweak and patch and customize (Linux).