DeVault: Reforming the free software message

I thought the enemy was proprietary, closed software. At the very least I would hope free software advocates would see open source advocates as allies here with overlapping goals rather than as the enemy. Over the past 20+ years that I've been paying attention, the free software movement has not done a great job of influencing people. This attitude is part of that.

The latent hostility among the GNU/FSF proponents is extremely off-putting to, well, most of the world that doesn't share what amounts to a niche viewpoint. One of the reasons that a "reform" of the free software message is needed, frankly, is because the GNU/FSF guard has been content to preach to the converted and has largely failed to effectively advocate for free software.

To me this is like a vegan saying that vegetarians are "the enemy" rather than seeing the communities as ones with overlapping goals. For people who've never thought about food as an ethical choice, convincing them to go hardcore vegan is a hard lift. But moving people to eat less meat and maybe go vegetarian moves them closer. Over time they may even be open to going full vegan, but from the get-go it's unlikely.

Likewise, the hard-nosed position taken by the FSF and others is really not going to resonate with people who can't even imagine themselves studying source code or tinkering with software. Or with developers who only choose open source (and I'm including free software in this because open source is a big tent that can include free software) for convenience and pragmatic reasons at first.