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Comment by acdha

Haha, that lazy troll takes me right back to Slashdot before the turn of the century. On the off chance that you actually believe what you're doing is useful, here's why this form of advocacy has singularly failed to attract converts (speaking as someone who's been using and contributing to open source software since the early 1990s): open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free.

That free software has to run on non-free hardware (even if the oft-heralded RISC-V revolution happens, someone has to manufacture the device) and most people do not have the skills or time to assemble the hardware or maintain an OS. That means that we're all making tradeoffs of what things we buy and what we do ourselves, and for the vast majority of computer users, even open source developers, that involves outsourcing that work to a handful of companies (or, maybe, a hardware company and Debian). Most computer users consider that a good deal: they spend time on things they like and pay a rather small amount of money relative to the utility they get from a transformative device like a general purpose computer. This means that for most people the decisions which matter the most are made by Microsoft, Apple, or Google — and that anyone who cares should applaud them improving accessibility because it will affect daily life for billions of people.

This is especially true for accessibility, where people develop deep habits around things like screen readers and quality matters a great deal. I happen to work with a number of visually impaired users and have not heard good things about the Linux screen readers compared to their Windows or iOS counterparts, and that means that in the context of this thread it's really not useful to snark about the moral superiority of free software.

parent acdha 5 years ago

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