Kuhn's Paradox
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Let alone that for many people, the name "Kuhn" is primarily associated with Thomas Kuhn, rather than Bradley Kuhn- adding to the confusion.
And it doesn't really qualify as a paradox in my opinion. Perhaps briefly counterintuitive. But the real question of "X is free and does the 'same thing' as Y, which is not free: so why are more people using Y?" Is perfectly easy to explain via UI/UX, discoverability, ease of install/uninstall, or network effects (all my friends/coworkers use Y, so I will too).
This seems like an uninteresting question named after a very interesting writer.
And then you have some who reinvent calculus and name it after themselves...
On the other hand, the economy just doesn't incentivize open source communities to build the very best software for average users, compared to say, making a billion bucks with by building my new shiny walled garden social network. Anecdotal examples and lots of great FOSS project aside, cash is king and capitalism doesn't favour open source.
I think a problem that's coming up now is that the lines between proprietary and free software have blurred. The FSF movement made sense in the old days when we had to pay a one-time cost to buy a CD with software on it. Today because everything is delivered as a service, it becomes very difficult to distinguish the software from the service itself. We're not just paying for the software anymore - We're also paying for continuous software updates, security patches and the ongoing management of underlying hardware infrastructure... The money has to come from somewhere.
I just don't understand the purpose of the FSF anymore... For the same reason that a 'Free Hardware Foundation' wouldn't make sense - You have to pay people to look after the software infrastructure in the same way that you have to pay people to get the silicon out of the ground to build your hardware.
I wonder how we can stop this from happening?
That's why you won't like the answer (I certainly don't); it's an extra effort in politics that people would rather avoid.
First, it's not even remotely factually true:
- It's easier and easier to use computers while avoiding more and more 'proprietary' software. 25 years ago you could barely do anything without a paid for operating system, now you would be considered a bit of an idiot if you tried to suggest a major datacenter running anything but Linux. The same goes for office applications etc, there used to be nothing at all, now there are multiple high quality options. The same goes for web browsers, and look at the demise of Flash and IE6-only websites. So for basically every category, the last 25 years has been a story of going from complete dominance of proprietary shrink-wrapped software to one where open source alternatives are almost as good or much better.
Secondly, if it became true, it wouldn't be a "a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory."
- A lot of or even most of the 'proprietary' software being created has no real value as open source to begin with. Lets say Twitter open sources their mobile client, then what? Are you going to modify it and use your modified version? That is absurd, virtually nobody would do this because of the difficulty of even running your modified version on a platform with trusted computing, but lets say you don't care about that. What is the benefit of doing so? So you can tweak a font or add a button? Twitter is releasing all of the open source they can extract from their codebase that they think people would actually find useful, look at all of it: https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/projects . The fact that the twitter.app for IOS isn't open source is 'meh', there is nothing interesting or hard about that app, and you can find a dozen open source equivalents , some of which are actually better.
So the claim is false, and if it is someday true, it's not even surprising, much less a 'paradox'.
It's quite amazing, computers are so much more fun with open software.
An average user has zero reason to "avoid proprietary software while completing their necessary work on a computer." They are too busy trying to do their necessary work.
This is I do not believe at all. Programming is today is so much more trivial than it was even just 10 years ago it's not even funny. I mean just recently I wrote a little app the allowed people to remotely connect to a server and not only interactively view 3d data stored on that server, but change the shading of the model depending on what factors they where interested in and to click on the models and based on the properties of the triangle they clicked query a database to get more information. A few years ago that would have taken a team of experts month to get up and running. Today I could do it by myself, in a few days, including the time it took for me to get up to speed on webgl/three.js, which I had never used before.
After all, developer productivity is greatly based on tools, and the best tools are rarely free.
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