@jwcph@helvede.netMost of those users don't care about ideology or politics either. People usually choose what's easiest over what's best.

Friction matters. If there's one thing that matters in technologhy, it's friction. Entire industries have been created because of friction, or sometimes the lack thereof. One of the best tools to combat friction is throwing a lot of expensive non-developers at the problem, another is invasive analytics, user tracking and metrics-driven development. Open source developers generally don't have access to either, which automatically puts them at a serious disadvantage. This is a lesson that hasn't yet been sufficiently internalized by the OSS community.

There are problems that can only be solved with scale, centralization and analytics. There are other problems where those are much less of an advantage. Most OSS advocates don't have a deep enough understanding of the tech to understand which is which, and that's important for figuring out where the easy wins are.

OSS operates in "berserker" mode, we tend to focus on the next battle ahead above all else, even if that means losing the war. That also needs to change.