Wait until he discovers the Fediverse....
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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A lot of the times when people hear of Richard Stallman, or other people, who correctly state that all proprietary software is absolutely inexcusable, they feel pressured. Which makes them recoil and distance themselves from those types of ideas. If you need to suddenly re-learn the entire way you are using the computer, and you may have certain habits, or certain things you rely on, or enjoy very much, either games, or software, or in case of PewDiePie, the platform he is on. You will automatically feel like whatever these Stallmans are asking from you is so absurdly hard for you to do, that you don't even consider it. More than that, to protect yourself from that hard work, you come up with a bunch of reasons, to not even engage in that idea. Which creates an opposition. And it is not something that we want.
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.
Which in itself is not actually true, but if you approach it like this with non-technical types then they will rightly and instinctively balk at both the software and you.
Bringing people to FOSS should be the same as bringing them to any other 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.
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.
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Great blog post! The mastodon outrage was a highlight as I see it again and again. Dunking on bridgy-fed, opt-out telemetry and donation pop-ups.
As I have tried to put myself in the shoes of a typical person I can see how they can view FOSS as crazy people in tinfoil hats creating templeOS.
