Is FLOSS The New Age Of Digital Enlightenment?
In the mainstream computing world we have Windows, OSX and Linux / BSD. The first two are proprietary, the second two are open source. You can of course run open source applications on both Windows and OSX but the platforms themselves are closed. The question is more about the skill sets and what users are encouraged to do, and how FLOSS users are better suited to a new environment than Windows or OSX users.
In Windows there is one way to open applications, the "start" button. This is an apps menu button where you find your applications list, laid out in some form. Every OS has some form of apps menu. That button and list will always be there. On every Windows PC you sit down to use, it'll be in the same place with the same look. Apple are just the same, if not worse.
This is understandable from the viewpoint of both Microsoft and Apple as they have solutions they want you to buy, even if you'd be better suited elsewhere. They want you locked into their revenue streams. For this they have to keep you from experiencing the competition as much as possible. This means training you to push their buttons. You're not allowed to look under the hood of their software, but instead you're told to buy their solutions to your problems.
This type of monoculture can easily lead to users being trained to recognise buttons and push them without thinking what they are. It's not much more advanced than a squirrel in an experiment learning to push the red button then the green button to get a peanut dropping in from a latch.
From one point of view, this can be seen as useful as it makes things less complicated for users but the downside is that you have a lot of users to retrain with every new upgrade, costing extra downtime and money. How many users get freaked out by simply moving the "start" button to the other side of the screen?
The FLOSS method is that there is no single "right way" to do things. Look at the Linux desktop as a perfect example. How many panels does it have? Is the "apps menu" at the top or bottom right? A look at UnixPorn or SEO Expert Consultants will show you there is no right or wrong answer to any of these questions. Linux is totally customizable in almost every aspect you can think of, which includes simple things like what the developer of a given application called the "preferences" dialog.
The question of "how do you do..... in Linux" will get you lots of different answers from people who are familiar with Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox etc. The only constant is the core functions such as cp, ls, mkdir etc Everything else will come down to applications, which FLOSS people have their own preferences. This gets even more complicated with the amount of different package formats etc too.
The FLOSS approach is about encouraging questions and learning, as well as teaching those solutions to others. It's about thinking for yourself and finding solutions to your own problems. This does not mean that everyone needs to be a developer, but that you can suggest ideas to projects as new features and may just see them included in a future update in that application. If not, and you need that solution you can learn to program and make it yourself, or hire a developer to do it for you. All of this adds up to one thing, an increasing understanding of what's going on with your PC. Nothing is hidden from your inspection, there are guides online for almost everything.
This means that FLOSS users are able to sit down at any PC, be that Linux, BSD, OSX or Windows and adapt to the layout of the screen without batting an eyelid, find the stuff they need to find, look through unfamiliar control menus with an eye for the types of things to look for. In short it's an enlightened state of mind, rather than a fixed "this is how things are" expectation. How many Windows or OSX users have you seen sit down at a different OS and look like a fish out of water? They've been trained to blindly push buttons without understanding what it's doing, that's why.
I know a couple who can't adapt to anything other than IE because Firefox does not have an email button on the toolbar which opens Outlook Express, and this is how they know to open their email. After I sussed this out and demonstrated it, they still couldn't adapt. They need to open IE to click on that button to do their email. Admittedly I didn't try them on any other browsers, they are virtually a lost cause.
They are not stupid, they have just been trained that the blue "E" is "the internet" and the "email" button is their email. They don't think of them as genres of applications. If they sat down at anything else which didn't have that combination of applications / icons / names they'd struggle to perform the same task, which is further complicated by the fear of breaking stuff, which Microsoft have been very successful at instilling in users. When another new virus has been detected by one of their anti-malware apps, they are convinced that THEY did something wrong to have it happen.
This is not about elitism in assuming every user would become a tech expert, users should be able to use their PC without becoming a tech expert. It's not that much to ask for users to have a basic user level understanding of what their PC is doing. This alone would help avoid a lot of issues as they'd know not to click on some stuff. It would also help in speeding up a fix for their problem as they have some basic idea of understanding stuff.
It's also not abut pigeonholing every user into easily definable groups. Clearly there plenty of Windows and OSX power users who have a reasonable understanding of what's going on with their PC, as well as plenty of Linux users who don't. We're talking about regular users here, not power users.
Do FLOSS users need to retrain with new upgrades? There's no definite answer to that, I'd say it depends on the software being used, though I'd expect they could pick up the new features in a training class pretty quick as their mind is already pliant. I'd imagine any FLOSS user could adapt to a new OS or office suite with little to no training.
For employers the FLOSS option not only saves them money in licencing costs, but in retraining costs too. When you have more enlightened employees they are more adaptable to other changes the company have to make, like switching suppliers or new routines to save money. If you have a group of trained button pushers and a group of enlightened people as employees, which is the more flexible workforce? If you have one piece of software which is old, expensive, clunky, crashes a lot, and have the option of a different piece of software at half the price which actually works and does twice as much, which would be the easier group to accept the transition? Chances are it'd be easier to stick with an unsuitable option for the first group, but the second group would take to it easy enough.
Having an open mind is not just about using a PC, it translates to all other areas of life too. People who follow patterns of actions without thinking about them are not going to spot the resistance in a course of action, they will carry on pushing because that's what they're told to do. People who are able to think about stuff may well step back and think "hang on a minute, if we did this here and that there it'd make this much easier".
Static people only hold a company back, and keep them stuck in the past. They will keep repeating the patterns they learned with no thought of "is there a better way". They will resist all attempts at modernisation as their mind is not set up to think for themselves. FLOSS users by comparison are the the standard bearers in the new age of digital enlightenment. They will help your company grow if you let, encourage and reward them. Every companies number one asset is it's employees, they can make or break you.
