Journal: Open letter to the F/OSS community

Speaking as a representative for the average computer user, I will try to explain the average pc user to the F/OSS crowd. Please note that I do not have a great deal of free time to carry on a dialog after this is posted. I will however try to reply to any serious questions as time permits.

    First, as average pc users, we don't really care about the whole F/OSS concept. We will never write code and we couldn't care less about the philosophical purpose behind what you write and distribute for free. Of course we can relate to free beer; that gets us excited. But more than just free software, what we want is software that just works and doesn't make us jump through hoops to make it work. We want to be able to pop in a CD or download a file and click something to make it work. We don't care what is going on under the hood. As long as it's not sending our credit card numbers to thieves or revealing our porn to our wives, we simply don't care how or why it works. If one organization could sell or give us a master program that did anything we wanted it to do, we would be very happy, clueless campers. We would not care in the least if an evil monopolist was controlling the entire computer industry - as long as our email, chat, photos, music, games, banking, and porn just worked.

The adventurous among us, that have investigated this F/OSS concept, have simply been intimidated or confused by the overwhelming amount of indiscernible information we're faced with. We've downloaded several of the so-called easy versions of something related to Linux, but we've ultimately given up because everything takes a lot of research and fumbling to get it working right. Every time we look for answers to a question about how to do X, we're faced with cryptic messages about compilers, command lines, wrappers, shells and whatnot. We don't want to know how to compile anything. We don't care what a command line is. We can't tell the difference between a shell and a GUI. Why should we have to? Quite simply, we are not interested in being programmers - we have other interests, jobs, and time consuming responsibilities.

Now the really, really determined amongst us will seek out knowledge by frequenting newsgroups, forums, or websites devoted to this free software. Unfortunately, the predominate thing we see happening in these areas is a bunch of infighting and bitching about how one distro is better than another, or how Microsoft is Satan incorporated. There's always a lot of talk about security and clueless users but, rarely is there any real substance that actually helps moving us clueless users into a more secure environment; at least not without requiring us to take a couple CS courses.

What's worse is the general attitude amongst a lot of the F/OSS community, which seems to believe they are somehow intellectually superior to those of us in the world that choose to spend our time learning something other than operating systems and protocols. As we see it, we don't expect you to know how to perform open heart surgery; or perhaps how to knit a woolen sweater, yet you are able to benefit from both of those, thanks to our hard work. All we ask is that you likewise provide us with a product which we can use without needing to know how you produced it or how it works.

In closing, it's not that we don't appreciate the efforts you put forth, we just ask you to remember that we are average users. Our skills and aptitudes vary widely. Also remember that we will gladly adopt anything that makes our lives easier, more productive, more secure, or just more interesting. What we will not accept however is the premise that we must devote an inordinate amount of time to learning how to install, use, and maintain your software; no matter what the perks are. There are at least two companies which already sell us stuff that just works; for the most part.