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I think the largest barrier for FOSS is still that the greater public doesn't know about FOSS, at all, and even less at the concept level. Because FOSS largely is still not on the daily political agenda, there's no actual talk among the wider masses about the reasons why FOSS is important, or what it actually means. Without wider discussion it's harder for it to gain foothold, as it is very much a political question, when it comes to use of FOSS in government. Although, this seems to be slowly changing. In Finland, YLE (the national broadcasting company) has recently been systematically bringing up the open source nature of the national Covid app in their reporting. I think there's a larger cultural revolution waiting for its turn, behind the current open source revolution that has been happening so far mostly in the software field. In its core, open source is a cultural thing, and maybe a political one, one that due to reasons that were, did found rooting and cultivation initially in the field of software. Regardless of its origins, it's a wider movement that could disrupt every aspect of content creation, if realized as such. E.g. the same discussion that is being had in this thread and in the original article, about FOSS in government, largely applies to a wide field of other types of content created by governments. One of the larger, self created obstacles for open source lies in the definition itself. Open source is still being defined primarily in the realm of software, and through software. Names and definitions such as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) reprise this problem by anchoring the concept to the world of software, and in this case, it happens already in the name. Instead of FOSS, maybe we should be talking about FOS software? I think the world could do well with a concept of open source that could be unleashed on all types of content created [1]. FOSS could probably do well, with the larger umbrella concept of FOS hitting daily discussion. Interestingly, open source as a term doesn't have this package, as source can mean more than just source code. [1] Creative commons already exists, but that's mainly a license, to be used in certain fields of content creation, not a wider definition for the concept. |