## 21 Is Free software becoming commonplace or forgotten ?

I looked at the evolution of the membership of the APRIL association, a French association for the promotion of Free Software and a kind of French Free Software Foundation (the FSF for France was closed in 2022). There are fewer members than before, with 30% less than the maximum. I have seen many blogs and websites about Free Software disappear. In France, there are not many websites about it, very few people making videos and podcasts. So it seems to me that free software is being forgotten. But when I talk to other people, I see that many of them use at least one free software. Of course, there are some famous software like VLC, GIMP, LibreOffice.... They're not perfect, but they're so powerful compared to their paid and privatised models, especially if you compare them to the online versions with subscriptions. The difference is that these paid online versions have strong marketing teams, not the free software. Imagine if the associations were to advertise for them everywhere, there would be some critici
sm in the free software world. Firefox and other softwares defending a different vision of the tech world now have less than 4% market share...or worse in the mobile world.

So in one way, the Free software is commonplace because of its success and because many (bad) geek power users want to keep the world like that, like a kind of secret and power they don't want to share. In the associations and users of free softwares, there are many people doing tutorials, sharing their knowledge and participating to install parties. I know both of these people and when I'm looking at my own actions in the recent years, I'm not very satisfied. I'm not writing about that subject because I'm not using the latest versions....Or I thought that. But I've let tools list on my French blog. I'm not in the main social networks, so I can't talk to the main audience, if we consider that only a small proportion of people are interested in this subject. I'm not writing in a cultural webzine anymore, so I can't put it on the front page any more. There are less and less French websites about that. There are less French websites about tech, IT, ...so less articles about that. And of course, the main media i
s not writing but videos like Youtube or shorter formats. 

If you work in IT, it's not easy to defend Free Software, except in certain areas. But if you work for something else, you're not going to write your skills in Free Software because it's not known by human resources and recruiters. If you can do the same thing as a Photoshop power user with the Gimp, I'm not sure that's going to appeal to recruiters in photography or publishing .... just because they don't use it. I've got some free software in my job and I tested free software solutions 10 years ago before they went for ....Microsoft. Now Microsoft is the big winner with this shit of Office365, Share-points, Teams, ... Internal solutions are disappearing little by little. Some people will say that it's better to have some well-known software on your CV than some obscure free software. Wrong, because it's not the fact that you can use one or two versions of this privatised software that's interesting for a job. It's the fact that you know how to use that kind of software. I don't put software names on my CV,
 I put software categories. The problem is that these big software companies have invested a lot of money in education to make sure that the children who grow up will always use their software. It was a commonplace to say that it's very useful to have the same software at home as you have at school or at work. Another bullshit we have to fight.

It's like learning how to write code in a language without learning how to write an algorithm. Many Free Software users have chosen this solution, not just because of the money or because they like the concept, but because they understand (at least in part, not by decoding the whole code) what is going on behind the screen. They are not "push button" people. But that's only a small part of "mainstream" users. That's why free software is often forgotten for the solution that everyone has seen on TV (e.g. Chrome, not Firefox), that everyone has heard of (Zoom, not free software applications). This isn't going to change because no Free Software user is going to allow the Mozilla Foundation or other Free Software companies to advertise. Geek and power users are the only advertisers for it! I'm not sure my readers are enough to change that, sorry, ha ha. But if everyone told their relatives that there are Free Software solutions for many of the software they use, it could change a lot. OK, that's not enough, beca
use sometimes the software is wrong or not very efficient. But if you tell someone that with every version change in their favourite software, they've had to learn a lot of new things, and that this is often more stable in Free Software, it could change the game.

I leave that outside my posts on the blog. I don't change software very often, so I don't find it interesting to write about it. Maybe I'm wrong, because on the other hand everything is good to dominate and make money. Privatised software has never been so powerful with subscriptions to keep users prisoners. One of the missing functions could be the need to share and work on the same document online. That's supposed to be the power of Office365 or Google Documents. But unfortunately, if you're a power user, it's bullshit because most of the functions don't work well or are missing. Sometimes importing an offline document into the online version becomes a mess. The online team and the offline team do not work together. And who really needs that every day? There are plenty of other cloud (and free) services with version control and collaboration management. I'm not sure it's useful for your daily and home life, but that's how it works: they sell you options you don't really need. Free software is not so glamor
ous, often concentrating on basic needs .... and not often with a shimmering appearance. So is the power user, and that could be a philosophical issue. 

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