The problem with this argument is that it doesn't achieve the aim of winning more users, even if it is true.

The "open source" movement recognised that users don't care about freedom, but they do care about other aspects. In a choice between 'proprietary and easy' and 'free but slightly-harder' users go with the first option: it's actually worse that this because consumer users are actually willing to go beyond 'zero cost' and actively sell their privacy in return for ease/sociability etc.

I think the actual issue with the OSI's marketing is that it turns out these words work for professional users of software and not for general consumers. Professional users such as IT departments care about 'power', 'flexibility', 'maintainability' etc - general consumer users don't think that way.

End users (particularly consumer users) care about achieving aims in very straightforward, simple terms! Neither, the FSF or OSI philosophy translate into perceived or real benefit for them.

To a large degree I think it's something like this:

Developers (care about freedom) <---> professional users (care about attributes) <---> consumers (care about ease of outcome)

'care about attributes' is the wrong word, but professional users tends to care about aspects of the software, they ascribe value to the software itself.

> it doesn't achieve the aim of winning more users

Winning more users is not an aim in itself, not to me at least. It's not a cult that I want to win hearts for.

But if people see how wrong it is to have a single entity control your computer (and almost everybody's computer), they are definitely welcome to ask for help installing something better (in that regard).

I didn't respond to the rest of your post because it builds on that assumption.

That's fair enough, there are lots of FOSS users who don't care about there being more users. They care about their individual freedoms - it's a perfectly rational view.

Perhaps I mis-spoke because I personally do care about there being more users of FOSS.

Really, we're trying to discuss how the FSF approaches its aim to "preserve, protect and promote the freedom" ...

Do you think that aim is enhanced by spending energy on what I consider to be academic hair-splitting, rather than addressing and explaining the philosophy to wider audiences such as users / academics / policy makers. Or am I misunderstanding how Free Software is promoted by denigrating open source?

But people don't see that, because it isn't true.

You're conflating the idea of external remote control of software with freedom to do what you want on a computer. They're completely different, unrelated concepts.

Of all the operating systems, only Windows does things that it really shouldn't, and resists attempts to keep it from doing those things.

macOS puts limits on non-expert users, but if you know what you're doing it lets you work around the limits - so far, at least.

Even iOS is easy to open if you know how to install fuse from the command line. You can't run as root, but you can access the file system without having to go through iTunes.

Ubuntu meanwhile added links to Amazon that no one really wanted. In theory you could get rid of them by recompiling or using a fork. But creating and maintaining a custom Linux fork is something that is completely beyond the skill of 99% of users, and probably beyond the skills of more than 10% of professional developers.

And if you're using someone else's fork, you have no idea what's in the code. We've seen libssl infiltrated, and it wasn't even hard. Who knows what else is in there?

In reality access to source code gives you absolutely no protection from bad actors. There are no reliable tests for overall security, and the ecosystem isn't large enough, focused enough, or professional enough to appraise security with any confidence.

So the idea that "You can control your computer" is just rhetoric. You can't. You will never be able to. You will always need to rely on an ecosystem of developers, and large parts of that ecosystem will be opaque and closed to everyone for practical reasons.

I think users choose what they see every day. FOSS OS distributions does not have the marketing budget to push their product into the face of the everyday user or bribe governments to put their product in use in primary schools to lock-in the next generation.

"You can change this (by hiring a developer to fix the issue you are having)." <- There: I removed your infuriating straw man. Also: remember that one way to "hire" a developer is for you and thousands of other people to each contribute only $1; this is something everyone does quite often (by buying software) and for years now has been even easier to pull off (by crowd funding "changes").

> hard-to-use, amateurishly designed, non-performant software

I think you went too far there and that's where I lost you.

I sure appreciate that FSF gives me access to a kitchen where I can cook my own dishes. I know how to cook, it would be shame, and extremely infuriating if all chefs were constrained to a shitty one size fits all "Mcdonalds". "Mcdonalds" is plenty good for many, and that's fine, its just that I don't want to eat there for ever after when I know I or someone else can cook up something better at times.

Or to give another example, if I know how to handle a slightly more complicated control I would happily buy a car that permits that, rather than some generic blasé Chevy Vega, may be a 911.

It is more "care about support" than attributes.

Yes, support is definitely an important one.

There are other attributes that some professional users care about more than just a simple functional matrix.

For example, I've been in situations where the ability for the professional user to fit the software to their specific requirements over time made FOSS the choice. Even though the initial solution was worse than the equivalent proprietary one. But, the idea that they could develop and improve it over time to meet their specific requirements was powerful.

The things that - to me, at least - are better about a Linux/Un*x-based desktop only became apparent after spending at lot of time using it (a year, maybe 18 months).

Which makes me pretty bad at convincing people to give it a try - "Yeah, it sucks at first, but trust me, in year you will love it" is not a good pitch.

(OTOH, having first installed SuSE Linux about sixteen years ago, the process of getting a Linux desktop setup is soooo much smoother these days.)

I would say the best benefit of using Linux over Windows for a casual user is to avoid viruses and ransomware and the like.

Believing you're more secure simply by using Linux instead of Windows is dangerous.

The Mirai botnet is the living proof of what happens when you use Linux and forget to take care about your security, not using Windows is not an excuse to lower your guard.

As an example, think about all the untrusted code you run, something so simple like `curl -o angular-react-vue-example.sh | sh`.

OTOH, not being familiar with troubleshooting low level issues means you'll never know whenever you get infected, remember kernel.org's hack[1]?.

[1] http://pastebin.com/BKcmMd47

the second best benefit would be the end to those endless update -> reboot -> update ... cycles ;)

You could sit your girlfriend down and do the "advanced configuration" on Windows 10, then she'll understand why Linux is better.

That would be missing the point entirely due to the fact that most users care more about ease of use and apps than "advanced configuration".

Not sure why we have to "sit anybody down" either...that sounds a bit forceful and unnecessary. Last time I checked, "better" is completely subjective.

But for the record, most people think Windows is better since that's what they've voted for with their dollars. Windows won the desktop war. It's got more users, more apps, more consistency, more stability, more commercial support...more everything. People still fighting for desktop Linux to become popular with regular users are like Hiroo Onoda, the japanese soldier who kept fighting WW2 for 30 years. Good luck with that!

The biggest issue imho is that there just isn't a nice consistent desktop story for linux. Making an application with a nice consistent setup and UI experience across all desktop environments and all distributions without having to distribute to several different package repositories or test on these distributions or window managers?

Until that works there is no one Linux desktop - only several different Linux desktops, each with too little traction.

You could sit your girlfriend down with nothing but terminal, the man pages for a printer or video card driver, and the root user password, and she'll understand why Windows is better.

mmc, regedit, powershell, sure this could cascade much further, but I think maybe op had the default privacy options in mind, which enable windows to use the camera and microphone feeds as the os sees fit.

Yes, this exactly. If anyone cared to check out the advanced configuration it is pretty much exclusively turning off security vulnerabilities.

One of them is "Automatically trust WiFi connections my contacts trust", a bunch of others are sending data to Microsoft. It's been a few months since I turned on a new Windows 10 PC but I was completely turned off by the advanced configuration.

The #3 story on HN right now is "Windows 10 in-place upgrades are a severe security risk"

I thought this was a good read the other day https://www.brokenbrowser.com/abusing-of-protocols/

It just seems terrible security wise, the OS itself is spyware.

That is to say, I was excited to be trying out a sexy new Asus Ultrabook with Ubuntu mixed in but didn't care to try after setting it up.

To me, my linux install is my manual F-150 and my windows install is my auto/hybrid Honda Civic.

They serve different purposes. They meet different goals. They have different pros and cons, but ultimately, I need both to meet my needs.

> To me, my linux install is my manual F-150 and my windows install is my auto/hybrid Honda Civic.

To me, the Windows machine I have to use is a Trabant with a missing front passenger seat and a nasty tendency to catch fire when it's cold out.

Seriously, it's horribly painful to use.

I have an Ubuntu desktop, Macbook Pro, and I tried a new Windows machine a couple days ago ( as well as having used one for many years)

I can't say I find any deal-breaking differences between them, or even points of significant more pain on any of them.

For me they each have their benefits.

Are you sure it isn't painful because of being on old hardware or something? (I've used Redhat - that was sometimes painful for me)

The hardware's less than a year old, but it's low-spec. Still, using it is so miserable that it makes me physically enraged. The login screen loses keystrokes; the browser constantly prompts for my smartcard; the system can't do partial OS updates; it tries to sell me things on the login screen and in the start menu.

Everything is painful, and nothing is pleasant, and when I use it life is dark and miserable and existence is cursed.

Seriously, that's not hyperbole: using Windows negatively impacts my life.

Running Debian with stumpwm, OTOH, is so comfortable it's like slipping on a glove.

When I get into a conversation about Free software being better than proprietary software, I focus on real problems with modern proprietary software that average users have these days, mainly with operating systems. For instance, lots of people don't like Windows 10's interface, but there's also the spyware and advertising issues, and various other annoyances with it, plus the forced-update problem and the fact that you have to separately purchase so much software for it to make it useful. With desktop Linux, you don't have these problems: lots of software is easily installed from the repos and you wind up with a fully-functional system very easily, updates are ridiculously simple and fast and don't prevent you from using your computer, updates aren't forced on you breaking your software, your OS won't be forcibly "upgraded" to a new version you don't want, performance-crippling anti-virus software isn't needed, etc. On the Apple side, the OS is tied to very expensive and now-crippled hardware (see the new MBP which lacks ports, requiring you to carry around a whole bunch of dongles) and still has the problem of not having useful software by default. For people who insist on using some kind of proprietary software like Photoshop, I just don't bother, but for people who just want something to surf the web, write simple documents, watch videos, etc., desktop Linux works great so this is how I pitch it.

"and the fact that you have to separately purchase so much software for it to make it useful."

That's not a negative, especially for anyone who makes their living selling software. And there's nothing special about Linux that saves it from that; if it became popular, commercial software would be written for it as well, and you'd have the same problem.

>That's not a negative, especially for anyone who makes their living selling software.

So you think free things should be banned so that leaches who want to make money selling things can do so? How idiotic.

If I'd like to make a living selling air for breathing, is it wrong for people to breathe the air that's freely available? I guess so, in your world.

>And there's nothing special about Linux that saves it from that; if it became popular, commercial software would be written for it as well, and you'd have the same problem.

Here you completely miss the point. I'm not talking about special niche software, just basic stuff. I can't even edit a fucking text file in Windows without installing some special third-party software, because Windows doesn't come with a usable text editor. Luckily there's free stuff available on the web for some things like that, but it's a big PITA to go find some website, find a download link, and install the program. On Linux, this kind of basic software is part of a standard install, and at the very worst, all I have to do is something like "sudo apt-get install vim".

>So you think free things should be banned so that leaches who want to make money selling things can do so? How idiotic.

Point out where I said it should be banned. And nice that you equate someone trying to feed their family with being a "leech". How idiotic.

> I can't even edit a fucking text file in Windows without installing some special third-party software, because Windows doesn't come with a usable text editor

Wrong. It has text editors out of the box.

> It's just not better, at least not for most people.

Certainly if you define "better" as "do everything I currently need it to do", Linux/BSD aren't any better. But with just a little effort, you can apply nearly any skills you learn in Linux in far more domains than you can for Windows skills. For instance, robotics and embedded systems.

"Enabling a path to future growth" certainly qualifies as "better" in my mind.

Not at all.

The main point of the article and you seem to be missing: freedom has intrinsic value.

Personally I don't care if you voted in the last election, or if you ever traveled abroad. But I do care very much about the rights that I have and allow me to vote or exercise free movement.

I also don't care if you are interested in modifying the source code of your operating system or the driver of your printer, but I do care very much about having a world where these things are possible.

The article is trying to exactly show that "Free Software" is like this, focusing on keeping the intrinsic value of having software that can be freely read, distributed and modified - even when it does not translate in more utility value, a.k.a better software.