Folks, let me share some random observations with you, because I can't wrap my mind around those.
-
People have Zoom, Teams, Slack, Discord, Messenger, Telegram, and Viber, all happily installed on their phones at the same time. When you then invite them to Matrix they are like "Is this necessary? Why install yet another one of those?"
-
People who use Chrome by default without ad blockers, and you just hint there is a massive intelligence and surveillance operation are quick to respond that "I am getting this services for free, so it is fine to give something back" [^1].
-
People thinking that OSS is not secure enough for their devices. Surprise surprise, it is the exact same people who fall for obvious scams and their devices are ad-ridden, bloated horrors that have not been updated in a million years, but they think that Libre Office will break their computer and lose their emails.
-
People thinking that privacy and anonymity enthusiasts are shady freaks who want to go live in the woods and possibly terrorists. There is a slightly insane take here that we are against technology because we refuse to "just" install an app to make our lives easier[^2].
So they do not complain about being exploited and disrespected, while ripped off and offered crap services, as long it is a capitalist corporation shaking them down with vendor lock-in and network effects. They are grateful even. But just the idea of installing a single free/libre OSS app or extension to protect their privacy is a red flag and pushes their buttons big time, even for just suggesting it.
So, what are your own examples of anti-OSS stupidity, and how do you explain its prevalence in society?
[^1]: It is how quick they are in responding that way, which makes me think that the idea is already crystalized in their minds, by some "anti-OSS" discourse.
[^2]: But just installing a Matrix client is a big deal.
I don't know if it is "conditioning" so much as laziness. The effort of having to learn open source software is a lot higher than programmers believe and a lot of money is spent by closed source companies to optimize ease of use above everything else.
Open source as an economic model doesn't have an inherent motive to increase use of a product the way that the profit motive exists for closed source products. An open source model is better when pleasing existing users instead of going for new users, especially users that don't have the technical skill to contribute to a project.
And your response is typical of open source software advocates; it is a skill issue for users to get over.
I can't explore the details right now. I believe that usability should be addressed by OSS developers. I believe in educating users as I believe in better funding initiatives to achieve that, as I believe in people also paying to OSS a fraction of what they pay to closed source corpos.
5 years ago, a YouTuber, musician, and UX designer who goes by Tantacrul made a comedic but accurately scathing review of the design flaws of popular open-source music notation software MuseScore. (He had previously done similar to closed-source Sibelius, and would later address Dorico.) By the end of the year, MuseScore had hired Tantacrul to head up their design team and he eventually oversaw the design and development of a completely new major revision of MuseScore with a professional team of developers. He also had a big part in Audacity's more recent development, since Muse Group also owns that.
That's one open source project that clearly really highly values a good user experience. They're lucky though. It's relatively easy for them to fund this because the open source software is a keystone element to their paid subscription web service with a very vibrant community of contributors. Not all open source has that.