Open Source Is Winning, and Now It's Time for People to Win Too
I don't know if this article is the right entrypoint for this discussion, but I think a conversation we need to have is how to teach people that they deserve to be treated well by their software.If you'll permit me a (perhaps inappropriately severe) analogy to relationships, victims in abusive relationships often stay in the relationship because they think their partner's behavior is excusable. Sometimes, this is because they haven't seen good, healthy relationships modeled for them before. "This is just how relationships are," they might think.While I think the term "abuse" is likely too strong for corporate software's relationship with their users, I do think we can leverage this same approach. By developing and maintaining "shining stars" of the open-source world, we can provide concrete examples to people that it's possible for their software to have a purposefully healthy relationship with them.The article calls out examples like Emacs, Perl, and Python, but the proportion of people who use software and have used (and liked) these tools is vanishingly small. What's a more appropriate shining star, our new beacon to show everyone how Software Ought To Be?The first example that comes to my mind is Firefox - but that was perhaps more applicable in a pre-Chrome world.