OStatic

This piece by Bruce Byfield sparked my interest a bit, because the topic of "world domination," is one that keeps me up at night. Specifically -- how can Linux edge closer to a majority market share, particularly on the desktop?

When you're trying to provide a system that is appealing to former Windows users, you generally find that a lot of people expect features that are often only available from proprietary drivers, codecs, or applications. So, the question is whether Linux vendors and projects should supply proprietary software in one form or another to address those needs, or to insist only on free software.

Byfield suggests that, by fulfilling immediate needs with proprietary software, we're walking down the wrong path.

Byfield says, "For all the long-term good such users have done themselves or others, they might as well have stayed on Windows." I have to emphatically disagree with this. I think it's far better for a user to run a system that's 98% free software than for that user to be stuck on a system that's almost entirely proprietary software.

It's important that we not lose sight of why people own computers in the first place -- to accomplish specific tasks and to make their lives easier. Few people are willing to embrace computing as a social cause, and sacrifice utility in order to maintain compliance with an ideal of software freedom for its own sake.

In an ideal world, at least in my ideal world, computer users would agree that Software Freedom is an important issue, be willing to support the goals of software freedom by supporting only the hardware vendors who provide hardware with free (in all senses) drivers, and would pressure companies to support software freedom by embracing free media formats and so forth.

In short, in an ideal world, computer users would support the goals of software freedom en masse and take the steps necessary -- up to and including doing without 3D support or doing without proprietary media codecs -- in order to move the world towards free software.

Of course, in an ideal world, I'd be three inches taller, much better looking, independently wealthy, and exercise five times a week. To put it mildly, we're not living in an ideal world.

Preaching software ethics to people who don't even consider software licensing to be an ethical concern simply doesn't work. Telling people over and over that "free software is important," doesn't work when software freedom is nothing more than an abstract concept.

What does work is to provide people with a taste of that freedom. Once a person has had the opportunity to really enjoy the benefits of software freedom, they usually will continue to embrace that path. But, as long as the benefits of software freedom are simply an abstract concept? You'll have little to no chance of gaining traction.

As a journalist I found this was also true of First Amendment freedoms -- most people don't find the abstract concept of the First Amendment to be particularly compelling, but when someone tries to restrict a person's First Amendment freedoms -- suddenly, it's very important.

When someone makes the decision to migrate from Windows to Linux, the odds are that the user is going to want to use their existing hardware -- so, the thought of going out and buying a new piece of hardware or entirely new setup is probably not that appealing. This is, after all, one of the reasons so many users have found Windows Vista unappealing -- because existing hardware doesn't have driver support (or good driver support) under Vista.

Allowing those people to move to Linux, even with a few pieces of proprietary software on their system, is much better than leaving those users on platforms that are entirely unfree because of an unwillingness to compromise even slightly in the short term.

I can only think of one thing worse than achieving world domination "for the wrong reasons," and that's allowing proprietary software to retain world domination at all. If Linux supporters are unwilling to be realistic about the steps necessary to help users bridge the chasm between proprietary systems and systems that run on free software, we risk leaving those users stranded on proprietary systems permanently.

Being idealistic is laudable, but being unwilling to see from the perspective of our users is a sure recipe for failure.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier works for Novell as the openSUSE Community Manager.

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