I have been a supporter of Firefox and Mozilla for several years now, and while I don't write patches and fix bugs, a major part of that support is educating people about Mozilla, open source, and user empowerment whenever a conversation about technology allows for it.
I've found that people who use proprietary software and operating systems often fall into two broad categories for rationalizing that choice:
1. They are told to do so by some authority (usually their employeer, sometimes their social tech support person, and in some cases, just because they were told it was the right thing to do by an ad or magazine article).
2. They started using it for some reason (typically reason #1 above) a long time ago and are now just accustomed to it.
I'm sure all this is going to be old news to most people reading this, but I bring it up because of an interesting article I read today.
In the 1960's and early 70's, psychologist Stanley Milgram performed a series of famous experiments
that tested the willingness of people to do something they would normally object to on moral grounds when they are in a strictly controlled environment and instructed to do so by an authority figure.
More recently, psychologist Jerry Burger had the opportunity to perform a series of similar experiments. This alternet article
describes the story and discusses the findings. As I read the results and Dr. Burger's statements regarding the findings, I started thinking about how easy it is for the people to choose to give up their freedom to a piece of proprietary software for reasons similar to the ones described in these experiments.
In a green field, these people would normally opt for software that provided them with more freedom and in many cases, subjectively better security, but because they are instructed by an authority figure, or because they got started with it a long time ago and just slid deeper and deeper in, those preferences are not enough by themselves to prompt the person to change their behavior.
Now even this thought in and of itself would not be enough to prompt me to blog about this topic. We're still well in the territory where the people who haven't gotten lost in a Wikipedia article about toothbrush hygiene they found when they clicked my first link are saying, "um, DUH!" So here is my point:
At the end of the article, Dr. Burger focuses on an interesting finding of both experiments. When a person is instructed to do something "wrong", they are significantly less likely to do so if they are surrounded by peers who object first
So when you talk to someone who is sighing about how much they hate product X but they don't have a choice, don't hate on them and don't deride them for not having a backbone, but just tell them and show them how you chose to stand up for your freedom and your security. An example can go a long way toward giving them the courage to listen to that little voice inside saying, "I want something better!"