Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

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I can't start promoting open source solutions to my friends and family because for most of their tasks, open source solutions aren't adequate. Some examples (taken from my wife):

- Art: Photoshop, Illustrator and Corel Painter are required by employers and educational institutions. GIMP/Inkscape etc. don't have feature parity so often can't be adopted.

- Messaging: Friends and family use Skype and Whatsapp. Network is too large to convert to an OSS alternative. No OSS alternatives are sufficiently developed to be viable regardless (Signal lacks a desktop/web (not Chrome) client, XMPP, Tox have no decent mobile story, Matrix clients are hard to sell).

- Browsing: Chrome's built in translation doesn't seem to have a viable alternative in other browsers like Firefox. Chromium lacks auto-update which is dangerous.

- Documents: There isn't any open source alternative I'm aware of to Google Docs that is nearly as convenient or easy to use.

- OS: Linux/BSD can't run the software needed for work/study so they're a no go.

It's easy to think in our little tech bubble that OSS is wonderful and we should be screaming from the rooftops to get people to use it but I just don't think it's ready yet. I can't even get my wife onto one OSS application and the same goes for most of the people I know.

"Friends and family" are perfectly fine with gimp or even something simpler.

Telegram owns Whatsapp across the ceiling and down the walls in every aspect (only one I'm not sure about is security and for that one I don't know.) We already converted the inlaws (yep, big family) few months ago and it works like a charm.

An 50 year old electrician was the first to show me Ubuntu back in 2006 and he was enthusiastic about it.

So no, I don't buy it.

Of course many of them will never care, but that is because they don't care, not because there aren't alternatives.

Edit: saw employers mentioned. In that moment we are suddenly talking about professionals who just happens to be friends and family as well. In that case Photoshop might be a good solution.

> "Friends and family" are perfectly fine with gimp or even something simpler.

Uh, you're not really in a position to say that.

> We already converted the inlaws (yep, big family) few months ago and it works like a charm.

You're totally ignoring the network effect. Nobody I know who uses WhatsApp uses it only to contact me. So now you've just introduced yet another messaging app they need to have installed and use to message me.

> An 50 year old electrician was the first to show me Ubuntu back in 2006 and he was enthusiastic about it.

So? I can't run Linux on my desktop because of some of the applications I need to run.

While I'm a huge proponent of open source, if you force it on people when it's not suitable you're going to encounter a massive backlash and turn them off it, undoing all the hard work that people are putting in.

You've accurately described the thirty pieces of silver for which you're willing to sell your privacy.

Choosing closed source software is not selling my privacy.

Statements like this make the OSS community seem toxic.

> Choosing closed source software is not selling my privacy.

With hypothetical closed source software in the abstract this might be a reasonable claim, but the software mentioned above includes a bunch of software which is known not to protect your privacy.

You can't seriously claim, for example, that Google employees don't have more access to your Google docs than you do.

It sounds like the problem is that they value convenience more than freedom. That is their choice and the only thing you can do is to explain that to them and to choose differently yourself.

No, that isn't the problem at all.

When you understand why, you'll be better-equipped to work towards real solutions.

But you don't want to teach me what the real problem is quite yet?

You could start by listening to the users, instead of talking down to them.

I am actually curious what you think the problem is as well. I have been modeling possible fixes to the general issues with privacy, consolidation and restricted freedom to use the internet/communications. There are a lot of problems which I will try and list breiefly:

1. Consolidation & definition of protocols as well as inroads to making use of communications tools are controlled by gatekeepers:

1. Google

2. Microsoft

3. Apple

4. Other providers in non-english speaking countries.

I wouldn't call this easy to fix, but I don't think it is super difficult to fix this.

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Let's assume you disaggregate some of the above and fragment it out enough where information is semi-balkaninized. I actually skipped over the initial problem referenced above:

It isn't people favor convenience over privacy (although they do) most people just DGAF. I think, and I have been considering this a fair bit lately, gov is actually pretty reasonably modeled (at least in the US) after society. No one actually values organization, deferred gratiofication, privacy or many other things I had previously assumed. So you actually just have to provide something really really great, get all the users, and provide them privacy for free and they won't care but will be semi-protected.

But, to resume here. If you build something people use, priovide them privacy, and dethrone incumbant internet companies, you still have huge obstacles:

Infrastructure. Broadspectrum is ~10 Billion for a band that can reach 200M people. Verizon is a 200B company (market cap). Comcast, Timewarner etc.

This is super hard to sort out. I actually think it is doable as well though. Let's wave our hands at this.

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Let's assume you have done the impossible: users all prefer amazing privacy by design top shelf UX open source software running on distributed systems in a decentralized network. You own bandwith and hard lines and insure you can protect and distribute signals with minimal interference. What do you do?

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No idea, pretty stuck here. I was thinking you return control to the people, but that doesn't seem to work. Obviosuly, I am sure there are some other constraints around just this general simplified model I presented, but how do you do decentralized governance. It isn't working well for Bitcoin. Interested to figure this out.

Yes, they value convenient tools they need more than some imaginary freedom they have no use for.

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