The Myth

To quote a friend of mine:

I don’t know that “people who want a free OS that just works” is niche, but these people aren’t really potential linux contributors, so it makes life worse for us

I’d also like to make two small points for clarity.

The first point is that when he says a “free OS that just works”, he is a statement not only about the “easy-to-use-GNU/Linux” as a whole, but Ubuntu in specific. This is an excerpt from a larger conversation.

The second point is that when he says “linux”, I take that to mean “GNU/Linux”, or the F/OSS ecosystem.

The Verdict

Well, I’ll start off by pointing everyone to MB#2, where I established that the idea that only technical users can contribute is false.

Now that we know that non-technical users can contribute in a meaningful way, we need to establish the next bit — that people who look for “easy computing” do, in fact, contribute.

Personally, I hate computers. I hate computers more then most thing. They’re frustrating and fail to understand even the simplest of “fuzzy” interactions. I do, however, spend hours on Ubuntu a week, and am still a Math & Computer Science major.

Hating the modern computing platform is a necessary attribute for anyone looking to contribute. If you don’t see problems, how can you fix them? If you don’t have the drive to absolutely tear everything apart for a small bit of progress, you won’t get far.

When people see that you can have a hand in making something better by using something they’re good at, they tend to help. Most especially if they use it; ergo if we build a system that is sane and easy to use, we will get lots of non-technical help.

This is all just a mild exercise of logic, and as any casual logician, I’d like to note that I don’t consider this scientific or accurate. To truly get a real number, we’d have to design a real test to see the return rate of non-technical users.

I’m ruling this one false, but it brings a lot into question. I don’t think, however, that I’ll be convinced that having an easy-to-use system causes damage to the F/OSS community.

It’s like saying we won’t have perl on the system, because people who code in perl won’t contribute good code.

It’s a harsh and unfair generalization.