The Wandering Geek

Over at NewsForge, Bruce Byfield tells us why Technical Writers Aren’t Using FOSS. What he found after some real discussions on a technical writing mailing list, is that most tech writers don’t use Free/Open-source software professionally, and that there emerged one underlying attitude:

However, what is more interesting about the comments is the attitudes they reveal. To start with, none show any interest in the philosophies of either free software or open source. Most had no understanding of them. Encouraged to ask questions, those who accepted the invitation asked the most basic of questions, such as what incentive developers would have if they didn’t get paid. A few attempted to debunk FOSS based on secondhand knowledge. Even more disavowed any interest in the philosophies, claiming that they were only interested in practical results. Posada spoke for many when he responded to my question about the role of philosophies by saying, “I don’t care about philosophy…. I’m more interested in the speed that I can get my documentation written.”

I wrote about this attitude before, it is something many geeks have a hard time understanding, even if you tell proprietary software users that FOSS will make their life easier (I was speaking in the context of Windows malware in my previous post, but the principle applies to other benefits of FOSS). It also shows the difficulty of displacing an entrenched standard, even if that standard is genuinely harmful. The initial barrier to adoption (that business and consumer PC’s don’t typically ship with FOSS), coupled with the initial learning curve (not hard anymore, just different enough to be a annoying), is still way too steep for those with purely practical concerns. They’ve learned to deal with all the warts their proprietary software has, and don’t want a new set to worry about.

Technorati Tags: FOSS, Opensource, Tech Writing