[akkartik]

I was trying to square the same tension in my mind when I made OP. And the compromise I arrived at was, "try to find people with complementary interests to organize with." That's really what "software with thousands of users" boils down to. If programmers who can take the lead when software is still small and approachable, and non-programmers coalesce around their forks rather than upstream, we might slowly evolve towards the hazy societal organization I'm vaguely pointing in the direction of.

But an essential component of this plan is for non-programmers to articulate early and often their desire to migrate away from the current monopoly they are forced to use.

[ccorxi]

Of course we non-programmers want to move away from big corps environments. Here's my 50 cents of what would be ideal for me...modular software, easy to assemble, no code. And if a module is not available, I'd be happy to pay a (reasonable) amount to get it done. All this open source.

[akkartik]

Why does open source matter to you? Is it to preserve the option to pay someone to make changes to it?