"Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step."

--Richard Stallman

Summary: Contrary to narratives circulated by Microsoft- and Apple-funded publishers, the quality of software one can share freely is oftentimes vastly superior to that of overpriced and highly restrictive proprietary software (most of which gets completely abandoned after a number of years)

THE financial aspects tend to be overstressed/overstated in the context of software that's called "free" because of freedom rather than zero-cost -- an aspect it often boasts as well. Zero-cost tends to imply easy access as zero-cost means you don't discriminate against people based on their financial means.

A lot of people rely on false equivalence to stigmatise Free (libre) software. Failing to note the difference between programs, which can be copied/replicated free of charge, those people typically compare it to cheap goods. As if to say that a cheap pair of shoes will have the same durability and reliability as cheap (or zero-cost/gratis) software. This is very wrong and we know why. We ought to explain why. We need to confront the misinformation. It is often promoted by Microsoft through its media moles.

"GNU/Linux developers don't bribe journalists (or so-called 'journalists' like ZDNet hacks), so they have a harder time getting the truth across."There are far more people involved in building a GNU/Linux system than there have ever been involved in making Windows or MacOS. A lot more bugs have been squashed and more features have been integrated in a variety of ways (even several times over, e.g. for each desktop environment). The slurs about Free-as-in-freedom software tend to be manipulative games of perception-shaping and geek-shaming rather than anything of objective substance. A good example of this was covered here in relation to the "Linux sucks" video tour, repeated endlessly for over a decade by a former Microsoft employee.

GNU/Linux advocacy does not have multi-billion-dollar annual budgets. GNU/Linux developers don't bribe journalists (or so-called 'journalists' like ZDNet hacks), so they have a harder time getting the truth across. ⬆