[Fsf-friends] Re: Free Software: What does freedom really mean... to whom?

[Richard Stallman]

    That's a bit of a myth, Frederic. Free software potentially only gives
    freedom to those users who are capable of programming, who know how to write
    code and want to change the source code of a program.

Non-programmers can and do use this freedom.  Businesses use it by
hiring someone else to make the changes; this is not unusual.
Individuals can use it by persuading a programmer friend to make the
changes.  As more people learn programming, it will become easier to
do this.

In addition, many of the changes that you want will be wanted by
others as well, and someone will make the change.  Then you will have
benefited because everyone has this freedom even though you did not
exercise it yourself.

    These metaphors are not only confusing but also
    running out in a time when free software really becomes popular and
    transcends its original scene where every user by default was a programmer.

That is attacking a straw man.  We never assumed that every user was a
programmer.

    It is time to take the non-technical user into account.

Oh no!  The time to do this was in 1990, which is when the GNU Project
first started developing a GUI desktop.