What is plato known for among people who don't give a shit about philosophy?
I see. Well then, carry on.
But maybe then do not wonder when the rest of the world does not care about software freedom and also don't donate or support it in any way.
Oh and Plato is well known as a philosopher, but yes, most people do not know that he proposed a very totalitarian state and is rather known for platonic love.
30+% of my country can't even be damned to vote for their next president. Getting the layman to care is really hard, which is why advertising is a trillion dollar business.
Perfect enemy of good and all that. Lawyers for 99% of their cases don't rely on public sentiment to get their argument through. At least not active public sentiment.
I mean, i would more wonder why people would think the rest of the world care about the gnu project's four freedoms or even understand them.
Half the time we can't even get citizens to care about basic things like freedom of speech.
But if you can get them to understand, that open source eventually means consumer friendly, that the device will be fully under their control(no ads, no restrictions) and working if OSS gets more support, they will listen. But since they largely do not know all this, I think it is exactly because most free software preaching evolves only around devs.
His message is pretty much user-centered.
(and programmers deserve good message delivery too)
The only time it's a problem is when an artist doesn't release their music on a certain platform and it's now work to try and go download a second app, make an account, possibly pay a subscription, and THEN listen to the new album. These are the kind of things users actually care about, not whether the app/backend is FOSS or not.
HN is a power user community so it's easy to improperly extrapolate our experiences and what we tolerate to what "normal users" will tolerate.
> who cares that they don't OWN the music anymore?
That's the thing, he is trying to raise awareness on this stuff. I do too.
If people cared, he'd be mostly done with his raising awareness work.
Open source is pretty much a developer issue. Free software, though, is a user issue.
(Of course we often use the terms interchangeably)
There are even strong theories connecting early Christianity directly to Plato.
[Before anyone gets offended, this is just a metaphor. Obviously plato had a much more significant impact on the world than RMS did]
