[valvar]

FOSS is not a company with a big budget and a CEO. It's a philosophy and a community built around the radical idea that user freedoms matter. If you want something particular to exist, then perhaps you should start building it or donating to those who are. No matter how nice or important it is, someone needs to build it and development requires more than just wishing — it requires money and time.

[simonh]

It's this user blaming by the FLOSS community that really sticks in my craw. On the one had proprietary software is immoral, on the other FLOSS software not living up to the needs of users is, er, the user's fault for not being programmers or personally sponsoring their own development effort.

[mlang23]

+1

Thanks for this comment. I hear this a lot from people who actually know about F/LOSS but were not able (or interested) to switch from proprietary solutions because their needs are simply not handled in an appropriate way by F/LOSS.

In the past, when I was still more enthusiastic about free software, I heard their words but they somehow didn't really sink in. These days when all I hear if funding and the lack thereof, I start to get what they were saying, and I am actually pretty concerned about this. The worst outcome we could have is that free software advocacy actually works and these inaccessible solutions dominate the market. This would mean that free software actively pushs disabled people out of our society. Thinking about this, I stand to my massively downvoted comment. This would be a horrible outcome. So as long as there is no solution to the "why should I think about these fucks" or "nobody is paying me to care for disabled people" it would be a bad thing to further advocate free software.

[simonh]

Quite, it's not that I'm against open source for FLOSS, there are a lot of hard working selfless people doing great work. It's the self righteous lecturing side of it that does so much damage to the movement and disrespects people.