"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects."
except that the size of the userbase drives companies to port their products to the platform.
except that the size of the userbase drives companies to port their products to the platform.
How convincing is this though?
"I would like you to volunteer to work on this project that you don't want and wouldn't use (and therefore probably won't do a great job with). You will be inundated with support requests from unskilled users. I would like you to do this because if a lot of people do it, it might convince a unspecified number of companies to port their software to linux at some unspecified time in the future. That's only if you are completely successful building this for and marketing this to people who you don't understand or care about. You will have no help from designers or user interface people because they don't give a shit about you or this. Design and user experience will be the most important parts of this, technical quality will not influence success because the users don't care about that. You will get no social capital from this because the users don't give a shit about what you do.
Do this instead of one of the huge number of really interesting projects building things you would love to have that are on your plate right now, the ones where your peers will recognize, appreciate, understand and value your hard work."