Open Discussion Day: The aftermath
As some people might have noticed, yesterday was the Open Discussion Day. On that day people are encouraged to not use any legacy IM services (see my (german) reasoning, or google for more details). Of course you should tell your friends about that some days before and encourage them to switch to a open IM protocol like Jabber/XMPP, or at least start using that additionally to everything else until they can drop their legacy IM service.
This year I totally failed to remember to do that, because I was busy studying for my Abitur. Actually I noticed it was Open Discussion Day 3 hours into the day reading a blog post on Planet Jabber. So all I did this year was to set my Jabber Servers Message Of The Day (MOTD) to tell all my users about the Open Discussion Day.
So I didn’t actually expect to have any success or converters this year (the people I talk to most actually already use Jabber/XMPP, but there are some people I really enjoy talking to that are not, so there would have been some potential 
). But I had a small success. Setting the MOTD actually got one of my friends to do some work trying to convince people to use open protocols. From what he told me he wasn’t very successful, but for me it is a success to see that I have convinced someone in a way that he starts spreading the word.
So I said he wasn’t very successful. Neither was I in the last years. I’ve been asking myself a lot why that is. I have to different theories on this.
1. People are resistant to change
For some reason people really don’t want to switch from what they know as long as it more or less does it’s job. This is true even if they are not really satisfied (I have heard a lot of Windows users get very angry about how bad their Operating System is and how many errors and problems they’ve had, but most of them didn’t even try an alternative system).
The problem is you can’t really convince this people by reasoning with them about the benefits of open protocols, because their solution works well enough for them. To convince those users one would have to first create a killer-feature and then create a demand for it amongst those users. Note that this would probably convince them to switch to open protocols, but they’d do it for the wrong reasons. If a legacy IM implements the same feature they might be gone again very fast.
2. People don’t want freedom
While I personally think it’s relatively easy to grasp, many people don’t understand why openness/freedom is desirable. Many people just want to be told how to do things, they don’t want to have a choice or freedom. Life is a lot easier if someone else tells you what to do.
Where I live what you should do on the internet is (according to what the majority will tell you to do) “Get a schülerVZ/studiVZ account, get ICQ/MSN, use Google and look for bands on MySpace” (side note: Maybe Jabber/XMPP just lacks a catchy TLA? 
). So that’s what people will do. If the majority does it, it must be good, no individuality needed, right?
Of course I need to put the FreeSoftware/free culture evangelists (my ) point of view here to: “Get a noserub account (if you really want social networking, maybe you’d actually rather write a weblog or a maintain a homepage), use Jabber/XMPP and IRC, support Wikia Search and look for bands on netlabels and Jamendo“
Tags: evangelism, Jabber/XMPP, Open Discussion Day, rant, TLA
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