I think it's time to kill a sacred cow about open source.
Personally, I love open source. I'm posting from a machine that runs Linux. I manage my documents on Libreoffice, regularly contribute to the Drupal project, and I even have a couple of my own open source projects that I lead. I want to see open source succeed.
And yet... we sit at a relatively low percentage of adoption for Linux, and LibreOffice, even though they are free and do not engage in the tracking that Microsoft or Apple are known to engage in. Further, this has been the case for years.
So today, we're going to talk about why that is, and it may involve killing a sacred cow or two.
I was talking with my father-in-law about Linux, and he made a simple point: With Windows, you can normally just plug in a printer and it works, or at worst you run an installer. He challenged me on how many people would realistically spend four hours searching for terminal commands or the right driver, which I do occasionally. I have no answer, because there isn't one. The vast majority of people want something that "just works," and no amount of open source virtue signaling is going to change this.
As a web developer I see a similar dynamic in the CMS (content management system) world. Wordpress absolutely dominates my favorite, Drupal, because with Wordpress you can just pay a site like Bluehost about 4 bucks a month, click the one-click installer, and you have a website that looks reasonably good. It might be horribly insecure and unmaintainable, but because Drupal doesn't have the same 1-clickiness to it, it stays in the domain of enterprise sites that need a lot of development. The mainstream wants 1-click.
If we want more adoption, then we have to accept that most people aren't going to change, and we should focus on making our projects easier to use. Perhaps here on Minds we could blog on #UserExperience and start educating each other. We cannot make the very Marxist assumption that "open source is the end of history" and assume it is inevitable. It isn't - we will only go that direction if we make it happen.
With that said, easier usage is not enough:
Profit is a measure of how badly people want what you have to sell. Profit is also the resources you need to grow your enterprise. If you look at successful open source web projects (i.e. ones where people dump proprietary alternatives wholesale), you will usually find one or more companies that are making money on the project, and very actively promoting it.
Coming from the Drupal space, I recently met the CEO of Commerce Guys. He wrote the original Commerce module, but after that, he started a company around it, and his developers now contribute full time what he never could contribute on a couple hours a night after work.And because he started a profitable company, there is now $1.5 billion in business going through his module. He doesn't capture most of it, but by making enough to maintain a good project, more people have options that do not involve mainstream commerce. In a similar way, Drupal itself has Acquia, Pantheon, and more, and Wordpress has companies like Bluehost, WPEngine, and many others.
We should learn from these examples, and study how to create a successful open source business models. We need the resources to make software better, and going full time helps you fight Big Tech in another. subtler way:
By politics, I do not mean clowning around on a street with picket signs. Instead, I'm talking about the fact that institutions, public and private, occasionally make decisions on how they want to conduct business, and the open source voice often isn't there. Further, educational institutions have to decide what to teach.
In my own case, the rampant political correctness and censorship on universities made me want to avoid any further contact, but after thinking about it, I came to a realization. I've realized that most students will get their cues on what software to use when they are taking classes on it, and if we make software that is accessible, and makes enough money that we can buy some access to he decisions makers (not bribery, but affording enough time to pursue the people involved), we really could start influencing schools to use open source concepts and software in their courses.
I think that we really can take on not only Big Tech, but over time other institutions as well. But first, we must learn how to build influence.
I want to close this with a call to action. Yes, open source is growing, and yes, it is starting to make its way out of software and into other areas. However, "open source" is not doing this. People are doing this. If you aren't contributing to a project actively, get onto an code education site like Codecademy, start learning, and look for opportunities to contribute. Or, learn how to build influence, and write about it. The most recent outrages about censorship were huge for building up Minds members (among other sites!) but we have to take this opportunity to also recruit more contributors, and to motivate ourselves to be more effective leaders if we want to see the open source movement grow to something truly disruptive.
If you are in the search/hosting space for open source alternatives, please check out my open source search/hosting group, or if you are into Drupal, please check out Drupal Module developers. We can also chat here in the comments if you have questions or ideas.
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