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

Easy, no Licenses/activation key

[ookabooka]

The selling point to get my father to switch to open office was that he could easily put it on new/other computers. He hated calling me up, asking me where that Office XP CD was only to have me tell him I have no idea. The idea of having 0 hassle when it comes to licenses and activation keys was the biggest selling point I can think of. Most people just want their computer to work and don't want to jump through a million hoops and keep track of that one cd-case whenever they want to install software on their new laptop.

"You mean I don't need a cd key for this? What happens if I lose the disc?"

"Uh, just download it again, it'll probably take 10 minutes or less on a good internet connection"

"Can I put this on your mother's computer?"

"You can put it on as many computers as you like, for free, have fun."

Re:Easy, no Licenses/activation key

[gEvil (beta)]

"But surely it can't be any good if they're just giving it away. After all, you don't get something for nothing."

Re:Easy, no Licenses/activation key

[AusIV]

I've found that people often have that cynical view of Open Source, and I typically have a hard time explaining why quality software is free. But since FOSS doesn't cost anything and I assure them there are no viruses, people tend to be pretty willing to try it out if they think they can save $20/$60/$100 on a proprietary program, and once they've tried it, they tend to change their tune.

Also, I keep portable versions of several programs on my flash drive, so if there's a computer handy I can show the program in question without even having to install it on their computer.

Re:Easy, no Licenses/activation key

[BrentH]

My dad is an excellent example of the problem posed in the article: he's more than willing to sink huge amounts of money in software (he's bought photoshop CS and then CS3 when it came out, dozens of raw converters and plugins, more than a thousand euro altogether). He just does not 'buy' it, when I tell him there's pieces of software that are free can be as good. He's never even tried the GIMP or Rawtherapee, and forget about Ubuntu, but you'd think that investing some time in these applications would save money. Not enough. When people /buy/ software, I think they assume it comes with some magic factor X that makes it better than anything free, because it cannot have factor X, because it's free. And you gotta have that factor X, because, well, you just gotta... I had to camouflage Firefox as IE to get him to use that, because I was sick of all these spyware that came streaming in. Also, the 'IT department' on my mothers school (she's a teacher) is another example. They're a poor school that couldn't even afford to repair a leaking roof for over a year (the water came an inch high once in the classroom), yet they made money available for a fat win2003 server and xp-systems everywhere, with remote desktop. This is kindergarten ffs, but the 'IT-people' havn't got a clue, being trained MS-monkeys. People are undescribibly lazy and stupid when it comes to technical stuff. They don't care to spend dollars/euros, they want to be done with, _zero_ _effort_ must be involved.

My solution

[Naughty Bob]

I tried persuading all my friends, citing the freedom argument, the security argument, the stability, community etc. Nothing worked. Then I learned how. Show them the spinning cube (With my heavy metal friends, I go for a pentagonal prism), and shout 'It's free! It's free!' Over and over.

Offer to buy them a drink.

[tknd]

I was in the same group of software mavens, the FOSS crowd, and ran into the same issues everywhere from home users to big businesses. That is I did not understand why it was hard to convince people otherwise with my beliefs on open source. Then I started taking business classes and I got into a few meetings between the managers about large software purchases and I finally began to understand the whole picture. The problem is, we geeks do not understand people adn their internal perception of risk. As I scroll through the comments here I see some stuff that I can already see not working and some stuff working (but the author does not understand why it works).

The reason why people are so ready to throw money at a problem (and a lot of money in some cases) is by throwing money at the problem you are at least assured that you have entered into some sort of contract where whatever solution you get will come with some sort of support service. They don't care that you have the solution. For all they know, you could just be trying to con them out of their money or trying to waste their time. Instead, they want assurance that your solution will work as advertised after the transaction has been made. In otherwwords, they want assurance that the perceived risk they have in there minds can be mitigated by the money they give. And they will never state that either because they are acting based on experience and emotion. People don't hand over money knowing full well that it is really just there to eliminate the risk. They will say that they agree that they are handing over the money because it makes them sleep better a night or they feel like it (what they get in return) will probably turn out as expected.

So when you, a FOSS geek, comes along and says, "hey, this free stuff works better than what you paid for" they are not going to believe you and will turn down the offer. That is not because they don't trust you, that is because they are not offered any assurance should you happen to be wrong this one time. And if you happen to be wrong, now they just lost an hour or so of their life (time is just as important as money).

How can you convince them otherwise? Easy, mitigate the perceived risk in their minds. They want assurance, the safety in knowing that even the 5 or 10 minutes you're taking from their life is going to be worth it.

So one particularly easy way to do that is to make them a deal: if they try the FOSS software for a day, and they find it does everything they need then they will buy you a drink, but if at the end of the day they think it does not work as you claimed then you'll buy them a drink. Besides getting you an easy free drink, this offers them the assurance that their time is not wasted: if the software works (there was no risk), then they save money (minus the drink), but if the software does not work, they get a drink for the invested time/effort. Without the drink it is a win-lose situation (if they win they win free software, if they lose they lose time and effort) and suddenly their perceived risks in losing take over. By introducing the drink you take their mind off of focusing on the risk involved and offer them some assurance that the risk they think is there is actually not there.

Others here have claimed selling the software by advertising features and "bling" that they have not seen before. While this works, the problem is now you have people spinning cubes and not exploring other things that the software is capable of. Instead you've sold them a "shiny object" and they'll use it just like a "shiny object." That's not what you want, you want them to use it as a replacement and you want them to gain confidence to eliminate the perceived risk they associated with FOSS.

Finally I want to be clear that offering a drink will not always work because people are different. Some people are more conservative than others and some people will take quite a bit more social effort to get moving along. But I assure you, the problem always revolves around ri