I talk to my wife about our budget while we are making changes on our individual phones that are synced in real time on Google Sheets.
I walk over to my home office and open my MacBook Pro with 16 hours battery life that runs silent. I put on my AirPods Pro that magically pair to all six of my devices and switch between them.
I log onto Slack to check the various groups and then use Zoom and Gong that transcribes and summarizes the call using an LLM. I then might use Google’s NotebookLM to consolidate all of the transcripts and documentation to summarize and to ask questions.
True I use VSCode that might be open source and has some propriety bits. I then launch Docker Desktop and start doing some coding depending on the day of the week along with some type of AI coding assistant.
Of course there are all of the SaaS apps that I use during the day - Salesforce, Notion, GSuite, Rippling (a YC company), etc.
Tell me how is open source going to make my life better where I am not using it?
Of course I know Node, Python, the underpinnings of MacOS etc are open source.
I am “educated on open source”. Why would I want to make my life harder or why would a company want to make their life harder by caring about a philosophy? My goal and the company I work for want to make their life as easy as possible.
None of what you said is a convincing argument.
Every Stallman's essay explains practical reasons for that. For example, with FLOSS tools, you are protected from enshittification (see numerous topics here about the software quality crisis of Apple and Microsoft).
And when most consumers look at open source alternatives to commercial software and hardware they are already “shitty”.
Are you really going to say that you would hand an open source product to most users and hand them a product by Apple or Microsoft and they would say the open source alternative is “better” for them?
> Are you really going to say that you would hand an open source product to most users and hand them a product by Apple or Microsoft and they would say the open source alternative is “better” for them?
This is exactly what happened when I replaced Windows with Debian for my non-technical relatives.
Now give your relatives FDroid over their iPhones and Android devices and see which one they would prefer. Give them an M series MacBook Air that runs quiet and cool with a battery life of 15+ hours.
Wait until they want to run Photoshop, Office or any of the other popular commercial software and you show them Gimp or LibreOffice. Or their children want to play the latest PC game with their friends.
This is true, and by design: >>45025116
> Now give your relatives FDroid over their iPhones and Android devices and see which one they would prefer. Give them an M series MacBook Air that runs quiet and cool with a battery life of 15+ hours.
Supporting freedom requires some compromises. Any improvement in quality of life for the people can only come with huge efforts. Some people aren't able to spend these efforts due to the personal problems. It doesn't mean they don't care.