The challenge is that we're not just selling software, we're selling an idea - the idea that users deserve control over their computing. We're not competing on the proprietary software marketplace, we're offering an alternative to it.

We are already seeing the proprietary software world enshittify. More and more "non-tech" people are looking for a way out. The challenge is to demonstrate that these problems are inherent to the world of proprietary software and not just because "Google is evil."

It’s not just that, the overbearing FOSS mentality, from Stallmans corner of that world, is that you need to take a damn political position on software to be able to interact with other people that use it.

FOSS is literally a political and ideological set of positions. The entire thing that makes Free Software and Open Source differentiated from just "normal" software development and distribution are a set of political and organisational positions, which are in limited fashion codified and expressed in software licenses, and also through e.g. structure of organisations around projects and why they're structured that way.

Without that, you just get companies making money from pawning off a portion of their development and infrastructure costs to volunteers and other organisations (non-profits, other companies, governments).

Bringing people to FOSS should be the same as bringing them to any other software,

FOSS isn't about fandom of a particular piece of software.

and if the ideology behind it is so self-evidently true then - by its own standard - it won’t need significant petitioning to convince them they should use more of it for ethical reasons as well as to meet their needs. This is software, not Amway. They’re trying to write a word document, not to join a cult.

This is absurdly politcally and socially naive. Also can we please ban stemlords from ascribing every aspect of politics and political advocacy to always being a cult.

Politics is what happens whenever more than 2 people make a decision