Advocacy 101: Don’t Preach, Ask Questions

“Ken Starks, a.k.a., Helios, over at Lobby4Linux.com, wrote
something I thought was pretty interesting recently. He claims that
many FOSS advocates have been going about trying to ‘sell’
GNU/Linux to the rest of the world, when they should be simply
pointing out the obvious. He starts off with the notion that most
non-techies actually don’t even have a frame of reference to grasp
the idea of freedoms 0-3. The truth is, they wouldn’t understand
freedoms 1-4; freedoms 0-3 would boggle their minds.

“I can actually relate to that. You know what led me to Free
Software to begin with? It wasn’t that I was deeply concerned about
my Constitutional rights, my Civil rights, or even my Miranda
rights. No, I was fumed about the fact my CD burner’s accompanying
‘lite’ software had an installation time bomb that prevented the
software from being re-installed after a certain date…”

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