Alex:
Yes, but it's not Free. I agree, freedom is a hard concept to sell. Do we want to compare Linux to the American civil rights movement in the 60s? Solidarity in Poland in the 80s? The fight against Apartheid in South Africa? Perhaps 1984 or Brave New World, the police state in the US and UK?To be honest, even if there was a way to promote that image without the 'silly' as you later discussed, I'm not sure it's really that effective a message anyway. If someone uses a piece of free software instead of proprietary, what's the main immediate benefit to them? Really, there isn't one - the value of software freedom is a bit further down the road ("you won't be forced to do <x> in the future" or that kind of thing) and what we're effectively trying to promote is something more akin to a promise or an insurance policy.
It is not as if there is just one benefit to free software. There are many. - It's less expensive - There are humanitarian benefits (which even if it does not benefit a particular user, could make them feel good that they are supporting technology that helps others) - It helps users not get locked into proprietary solutions that are expensive and otherwise damaging, etc. - Free software tends to be based on UNIX, which has all sorts of security, performance, and other technology benefits compared to the market leader. - And so on. I'm not sure if any one benefit is enough to get people excited about using free software. It may be helpful to find a way to capture these many benefits in a digestible form, rather than focus on a particular one.
Trying to market something on "jam tomorrow" is hard. I think it would be especially hard when, for the most people, the non-free aspects of proprietary software generally don't bother them. People don't feel digitally oppressed, and no marketing campaign that we could launch is going to bring them to any point of recognition imho. If you ask a selection of people what problems they have with their computer, I would be amazed if any issues that were more than tangentially related to freedom came up.
True. I think most people are happy to spend the extra money in exchange for what seems to be a guaranteed trouble-free operating system. While people like freedom, I think that in many people's eyes they prefer paying for a service. Perhaps similar to the attitude many people might have about preferring private health care over free public health care. Perhaps if there were stronger or better organized services to help people overcome problems with getting free software to meet their needs, it might help. When people use Windows or MacOS, they never have to fret about whether the operating system supports their wireless adapter or other hardware device. While this may not be true (I have had troubles getting devices to work on Windows for sure), I think it is a common perception. Many users probably may not feel sophisticated enough to figure out how to install an operating system by themselves, and may be quickly turned off if they try and have a problem, or worried they may "mess up" their computer. This is a hard problem to solve, since the competition has the ability to pre-install their operating systems on the computers most consumers tend to buy. So, most device issues are worked out by the hardware vendors before people purchase the computers. Users are not in the habit of checking "do my devices work with a particular OS", they just assume they should work. Over the years, device support for free operating systems has improved by leaps and bounds, but it isn't perfect; and perhaps will never be up to the level that proprietary systems can achieve. Perhaps, over time, as more hardware vendors provide free-software based products, this issue will diminish. So, I think one of the challenges of marketing free software is helping users to overcome these issues and concerns. While, yes, free software may be a bit of a pain in some ways, we need to communicate the value in a way that is compelling enough to get people to take the plunge even if there may be some pain. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
