We misunderstand the strengths of the commons of tools and not knowing how we play to our strengths.
Free software today is usually promoted through big brands like libreoffice, gimp or firefox. These are successful in terms of branding, but is not playing to the strengths of the commons. In the commons, we move away from the walled and towards the interconnected.
The strenghts doesn’t lie in bloated and branded tools, but rather in the small tools that anyone can make if they have some spare time. We need to reframe away from the bloatedness to the caresome. Where the tools are easily made, available by birth and easily tinkerable.
And we need towards the descriptive instead of the branded. Towards letting words dictate tools instead of tools dictating words.
Today operating systems revolves around the branded, bloated and wasteful. The lokening is to move towards operating systems that inbosoms the caresome and descriptive.
learning to use a workshop has nothing to do with how the tools are constructed. open source means very little to people who are not familiar with software tools, and is not likely to get someone started.
as soon as you are even starting on an intermediate level you need to care a lot, because you start building your own tools. but before that point, open source just means the big players. good luck explaining the benefits of
awkbefore they know the difference between office and openoffice.As another poor maladjusted soul who still often calla LibreOffice “OpenOffice”, you have my complete sympathy.
Libre is just a god awful word to say out loud. For a philosophy it’s fine, but for branding it’s terrible.