Here’s What is Stopping Us From Using Free Software

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:13:45 +0530

A couple of thoughts on Robin’s post.
Because I’ve spent a lifetime using both FOSS and proprietary software and more than two decades, advising and supporting people and businesses who do the same.

To paraphrase Robin’s own point. Most people don’t care.¹

If it runs Minetest, then it’s fine.

aka “If it does the thing, I want it to do, without too much cognitive overhead, I’ll use it.”
Learning the skill, so I can do this task, is definitely not what the world at large wants to do. Nor do I imagine, do most folk have the time and the bandwidth. iTunes (and Netflix) when they launched², were the prime examples of this. Convenience and ease of use trumps Free. Also by that same token, VLC is probably one of the most installed and used video players in the world, not because they are FOSS, but because they make it easy to install and use.

Some people feel strongly about having control over what they do, over their data. Those folks were those I found easiest to move to Free software, because it aligned with what they wanted.
Support costs are about the same.
If a small business chooses to use free software, the cost of supporting it, if stuff breaks, (specially if it’s business critical³) probably is about the same as paying for the proprietary version. The fact that paying and getting it fixed benefits the world at large is lost on most. Or maybe it’s something, we Free Software evangelists could learn to to better. Robin promises his team, first-level support, but what happens when he goes on to better opportunities and is no longer around?

So I agree with most of what Robin says, with just one caveat.

People aren’t afraid of change. Atleast not the kind of change, Free Software poses.
People just don’t have the time and the energy to deal with change, with everything else happening in their lives.
Free software is just not as important to them, as it is to us. That is all.⁴

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And I’d venture to say, that’s perfectly ok. ↩︎
before they went to pot ↩︎
rpm updates, bork my expensive garment printing machine, anyone? ↩︎
And once again, that’s perfectly ok too. ↩︎

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Here’s What is Stopping Us From Using Free Software