> I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position
It's more damaging than that. The bundling of privacy and FOSS advocacy weakens the former. Few without deep technical knowledge is sympathetic to FOSS. The potential audience for a privacy pitch is broader. By bundling the two, however, the technical advocacy community limits the appeal of the former to those supporting the latter. This is an issue because the opponents of privacy rights are not similarly limited. Hence, we find ourselves reliant on Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon being benevolent dictators, in their services and Washington.
Yes, all they know is “this is impossible to install” and “what is a GitHub” and “where do I log in to the cloud?” and “this is the ugliest software I have ever seen in my life”.
Unless we’re talking about hosted FOSS, in which case you get the worst of both worlds.
I run my own mail server so this comes from a place of love: FOSS for server side products for consumers is a joke.
It's more damaging than that. The bundling of privacy and FOSS advocacy weakens the former. Few without deep technical knowledge is sympathetic to FOSS. The potential audience for a privacy pitch is broader. By bundling the two, however, the technical advocacy community limits the appeal of the former to those supporting the latter. This is an issue because the opponents of privacy rights are not similarly limited. Hence, we find ourselves reliant on Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon being benevolent dictators, in their services and Washington.