On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 18:01 +0100, Theo Schmidt wrote:
Stephane Ascoet schrieb:
Jelle Hermsen a écrit :
I derived this idea from social psychology and I would love to hear what you all think of it.
Hi, I think you're right. We're facing the same issue while trying to convince people to stop meat consumption.
OK, hands up for those who love free software and open content, go easy on the meat, prefer cycling to driving and using trains to planes, and try to use solar energy rather than fossil or atomic fuels! :-)
Seriously, I find some of these things go together, but professing to them all is guaranteed to get labelled as a "do-gooder" ("Gutmensch" in German), not meant as a compliment!
Theo Schmidt
I agree that it might be a good idea to compartmentalize your ideals, so that you're not spreading them thin. But being a Gutmensch also implies that you're naive and impractical and I think that might be somewhat of a harsh judgment. Take RMS for example. When I take a look at his website (http://stallman.org ) it's hard to miss that he cares about a lot of issues, but I wouldn't say he's naive or impractical, au contraire, mon frère. However, I do believe you raise an important point. Where do we draw the line. Which issues belong to the FSFE and which don't? It's obvious meat consumption doesn't, but what issues surrounding free software and computing in general should we fight for?
- Do we care about the low participation of women in floss (I know I do)?
- What do we think about the digital divide, in which people (mostly elderly, but don't forget illiterates) miss out on the digital age. Free software could be of great importance here!
- And what to say about the need for widespread broadband internet coverage. Children are growing up in rural areas in Europe without access to all the digital goodness we take for granted. Tried to surf or apt-get/yum with a 56k6 modem lately?
Just to name a few. I don't say we should care about every single thing and it's very important to keep your focus, but when it comes to caring about other people and good causes in general, I'd rather be a somewhat naive altruistic sissy than a clear headed guy who knows when to tone down.
Cheerio, Jelle
Are these good practices?
Let other people say, open source, reply with Free Software, until they say they are the same, and then fire out a stock reply, "They are not, you should say Free Software ..." (for reasons people on this list understand and I won't bother to repeat).
When talking about Free Software let someone else say closed source or copyrighted or professional or something else that is blatantly wrong and then help them see why their phrasing does not work, and the phrase they search for is proprietary software, and it is called this because of the licence you get restricting their freedoms.
We should remember we became as expert as we are in the domain over a long period of time, we can't educate people all in one go, so spread a little every day! ;-) We have the answers, let people question, don't take it as an opportunity to brain dump. Free as in Freedom is a great way to keep them engaged. (See the first start up screen of gNewSense, it was a huge statement and got the focus where it was needed.)
Maybe it is true and if we lead with proprietary software means we are on the back foot in your attack from the off, this of course means that the space is open for our enemy to exploit, therefore lead with our weapon, Free Software, personally it has often be easy for me to start to explain it by saying Free as in Freedom, and to guide this we have four basic rules. For the lay person that is usually enough in one go.