[PLUG] FOSS Activity and Non-Technical People

[Mayuresh]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 09:05:20AM +0530, Vinayak Kulkarni wrote:
> And more importantly, Thing about software that it is Free or Paid does not matter to them
> (.. mostly all of them use pirated copies of the software).
> They are more comfortable with that.

Costs don't help win users over a sufficiently long period of time. One
reason could be piracy. But look at the count of great many people who do
pay for it - either through a branded computer purchase or from market and
also the corporate entities.

Leave the pirates, what can FOSS community to do to attract these people
to whom cost is not an issue (as they are willing to pay)?

The rest will follow.

In various forums I have seen FOSS community merely trying match the
dominant OS, feature for feature. If we talk "me-too", people will
continue to go with a time tested choice. We first need to talk about our
differentiators and "me-too"s can be just a "BTW" information.

Freedom to view source and change software is one thing that is often
stated as important differentiator. While that is great for technical
people, it is nearly immaterial for non technical ones.

It's time we try and state some real differentiators that matter to
people. Cost may be one of them but we need more substantial ones.

Mayuresh.