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917 points cryptophreak | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
1. pessimizer ◴[] No.45762093[source]
Couldn't agree with this more. I'm even an advocate for simulating walled gardens with Free Software. Let people who need to feel swaddled in a product or a brand feel swaddled.

It also opens up opportunities for money-making, and employment in Free Software for people who do not program. The kind of hand-holding that some people prefer or need in UX is not easy to design, and the kind of marketing that leads people to the product is really the beginning of that process.

Nobody normal cares that it's a thin layer over the top of a bunch of copyleft that they wouldn't understand anyway (plenty of commercial software is a thin layer over permissively licensed stuff.) Most people I know barely know what files and directories are, and the idea of trying to learn fills them with an anxiety akin to math-phobia. Some (most?) people get a lot of anxiety about being called stupid, and they avoid the things that caused it to happen.

They do want privacy and the ownership of their own devices as much as everyone else however, they just don't know how much they're giving up when they do a particular software thing, or (like all of us) know that it is seriously difficult if not possible to avoid the danger.

Give people mock EULAs to click through, but they will enumerate the software's obligations to them, not their obligations to the software. Help them remain as ignorant as they want about how everything works, other than emphasizing the assurances that the GPL gives them.