Comment by bruce511
21 hours ago
The moment you say Linux you immediately eliminate 97% of the population.
When you add f-droid (like that's a completely normal way of naming things) you pretty much ensure that 97% starts thinking about anything else.
I get it, you like OSS. I like it to. But for 97% of people its just completely irrelevant. None of your "advantages" matters to 97% of people.
Let's leave aside for the moment that pretty much all (with a few notable exceptions), OSS software compares terribly to commercial software. Lets ignore that Support for OSS software is pretty bad.
The biggest reason you can't convince anyone to use OSS is because you clearly believe OSS is good. When an objective person, 97% of whom have never seen a command line interface, or actually installed ANY OS ever take one look and see a big pile of pre-fan supplements.
I say this as someone who makes use of OSS software every day. There is outstanding OSS software available. I could list many great nuggets.
Categorizing software as good or bad based on the license is probably the least useful way to do it. All licenses, commercial or open, cover software that's mostly rubbish, with occasional good offerings. You may as well evangelize red cars as being better than blue cars.
So yeah, stop selling the "license". Nobody cares about the license. If you like Postgres then evangelize that. The license is completely irrelevant.
> So yeah, stop selling the "license". Nobody cares about the license. If you like Postgres then evangelize that. The license is completely irrelevant.
People care about the license because if the license is, let's say source available and a commercial license on the side, then the problem is that the software stops being permanent and relies on that company.
Why so? Because if the company let's say enshittens the project in one version, and the community starts using the last version that wasn't enshittened, they inevitably lose out on bug fixes / qol updates etc.
now you might say that people should fork it. But nobody really likes forking a repository with source available license either because of the license or because the company itself would benefit more from the code updates that they write and use it themselves or sell their version as well due to the commerical offerings or the dev's would simply be less willing to due to all of such things.
I am not a license purist. I like https://anticapitalist.software/ (Acap license) the most, its because I don't like some commercial usage which would've just taken my labour for it is and not donate to me if I write some software
In general, the ACSL is a good match for software that would have otherwise been permissively licensed under MIT, ISC, or BSD but with restrictions against corporate usage. Here is an excerpt from ACSL:
The ACSL is right for you if you want your code to empower students, artists, hobbyists, collectives, cooperatives and nonprofits to survive under capitalism while not contributing free labor to corporations.
The ACSL is right for you if you reject the status quo, believe better things are possible, and want to act on your beliefs.
The ACSL is right for you if you carry a new world in your heart, and in your code.
That being said, I don't mind licenses that much, source available can be fine too for a peace of mind at-least. If there is any source available license which requires a one time license or something,I think its okay. So I am not sure how somebody is selling the license. The license is a little important, but the battle is against proprietory vs source-code available. The battle is between complete black box vs something you can look inside and have peace of mind.
>> People care about the license
The % of people who could name a license (any license at all) is a rounding error from 0. Imagine just about anywhere outside SV, say Nashville, Tennessee. Imagine going into a supermarket there and asking 100 (or 1000) moms, workers, shoppers, kids to name a license. Imagine visiting every worker in every shop in the mall. How many do you think could even tell you what software they use?
So yeah. A rounding error of people care. And the programmers among them will wax lyrical on the 4 freedoms, and why source available is not as good as MIT which is not as good as GPL etc.
99.9% of people doing see "look inside" as worth anything. Unless you have a very special set of skills, it's a meaningless proposition.