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Making FOSS 'Sticky'

There was a lot of intriguing feedback from my last post, about the MakeTheMove.Net campaign to get people to switch to Linux.  Most of it revolved around the issue I'd touched on with my own discussion: Amongst nontechnical users, Linux (and probably open source in general) has a bit of a PR problem, and the people doing the advocating often have no idea what that problem really is.

Let me drop back a bit and talk about some of the things that spurred me to discuss MTM in the first place.  The other day I came across a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.  It's in roughly the same sort of vein as books like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics -- pop-science discussions of how certain things work, aimed mainly at businesspeople and just-plain-folks rather than scientists per se.  Books like this can be terribly hit or miss; I thought Blink, for instance, was more an example of inference-after-the-fact than anything else.  But a lot of what's in Made to Stick seems to apply to what's going on here.

The basic premise of Made to Stick is that certain concepts have a way of hanging around because they're phrased in a certain way.  Whether or not they're accurate or true is beside the point; it's that they're memorable and resonant.  They use urban legends as an example: they're vivid, they tell a story (however cautionary, grotesque, or paranoid), and ... well, they get around!

The Brothers Heath discuss how a concept can be couched in the right terms to make it "stickier".  This whole razor cuts both ways, of course: it can be used to take a good idea and make it better, and it also can be used to dissect propaganda that has no intrinsic truth.  Both truth and falsity can have stickiness.

Now here's the rub.  Most of the discussions I've seen on the merits of FOSS are not "sticky".  They tend to revolve around abstractions: freedom of information, user's rights, open this, open that.  There's not much use of concrete scenarios, examples, narratives -- as the Heaths like to say.  FOSS advocates seem to think that FOSS will be the software that sells itself, but things just don't work like that.

Even if what you're doing is inherently better, there always has to be a case made for it so that people can know that, in their gut.  Abstract arguments only work for people who honor abstracts in the first place, and how many of us are really like that?  (I am, but only after trying really hard.)

Finally, I need to separate all of this from another idea that people pointed out in the comments -- namely, getting people to be more PC-savvy as another solution to the problem.  That's a great idea by itself -- but it also comes with a whole briar patch of thorns, which I'll talk about next time.

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