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Jon maddog Hall blogged:
I am never again going to tell people why they should be using Free Software.
Instead I am going to ask them why they insist on using closed source software.
Is it because they love paying lots of money for software that does little more (if anything) than suitable Free Software?
Do they use closed-source software because they love waiting weeks and months for patches that they might have gotten much sooner in the Free Software community?
Perhaps they love getting new versions of the software thrown out at them every so often, instead of being able to directly interact with the developers through forums and mailing lists.
I will wait for these people to tell me that they use closed-source software because of the software warranty (laugh) or the support they get (bigger laugh).
What I really expect is that when I ask the question, I will get a sort of puzzled look and they will say "I do not really know why I use closed source software" and I will be most of the way to converting them.
There's also an old adage along the lines of "Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand." Has anyone here attempted the above approach? What results have you had?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday September 22 2014, @01:27PM
About 15 years ago in my FOSS journey, I evangelized for FOSS. I tried every approach and tone and argument I could. They were the heydays of RMS and ESR and /. was always abuzz with the discussion, so I borrowed ideas from other FOSS advocates, too. Then after several years of getting nowhere I woke up one day and decided that using FOSS gives me a competitive advantage, and it's a very good thing that most of the rest of the world doesn't. Now I realize that I would actually like for this state of affairs to continue, because it means that advantage continues to help me in my quest to make the world a better place.
So let's not waste energy, my fellow FOSS believers, on trying to convert the heathen. Let's instead make FOSS ever better and brighter so that it may buoy us higher.
Washington DC delenda est.