The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced its project to bring mobile phone freedom to users. “Librephone” is an initiative to reverse-engineer obstacles preventing mobile phone freedom until its goal is achieved.
Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.
Do you think good marketing necessarily leads to unethical business practices?
Marketing is unethical because it is consentless
Doesn’t have to be. Marketing also includes a website, that you as a user need to consciously visit to see, which I would definitely consider consensual.
Commercials like billboards are a different story, those definitely suck
I feel it’s a bit like the usability vs security dilemma… you can try to optimize to have both, but then you won’t have as a result neither the most secure system nor the smoothest user-friendly experience, but something in between (you might still consider that “secure” or “usable”, but that just depends on where you set your expectations).
If you want to maximize marketing then the result won’t be as ethical as it could be, and if you want to maximize ethics then the result won’t be as marketable as it could be.
good marketing does not require maximizing it, I think. I see where you’re coming from though, any effort spent on marketing could have been spent to create a better product. Having the perfect product is useless when nobody knows about it, though, so as always there is a balance to achieve.
Good marketing means achieving an arbitrary limit of what you consider “good” marketing. So it depends on where you set the bar.
The best marketing necessarily requires some level of unethical behavior, because being honest and saying the whole truth doesn’t sell. Everything has drawbacks and benefits… the better marketing minimizes (or even hides / fails to mention) the drawbacks and emphasizes the benefits, which is a form of deception.
<gestures at all the enshittified software products from the last 30 years>
In our current economic philosophy, yes.
I think you mentioned a keyword you’re ignoring here: product. This enshittification happens in a commercial environment. Good marketing does not require a commercial product.
Whatever it is you’re referring to here certainly doesn’t change the fact that the FSF sucks at marketing.
Which makes sense, since that is not what I was saying. I’m saying that a FOSS project with good marketing doesn’t necessarily become like google.