Writing For Advocacy. (October 15th, 2003)

One Too Many Viruses: Converting a Non-Geek to Linux, Part 1

This article serves as an example of how a lot of FLOS advocacy

needs to happen - people need to be able to read and understand things

for FLOS and GNU/Linux to be advocated. Telling someone what to type at

the command line is fine - we all need that sometimes - but what is

more important is making it accessible to users.

When I say accessible, we're not talking about the user interface,

the peripherals and what have you. I'm talking about the concept of speaking at the level of the audience.

I hate that term, because it lends itself to 'higher' and 'lower', but

- it is what it is. There's room for less tech in writing about how

good FLOS is.

I write all of this because... well, because all too often I see

people who would otherwise be interested in FLOS roll their eyes back

in their heads when they start seeing things in courier (code, command

line options, etc). These people don't *want* to know all of that.

They just want it to work. And you know what? That's reasonable.

Geeks criticize articles like this one - they say it's not technical

enough - they say it's for newbies... and I say *EXACTLY*. If you don't

like it, don't read it - but don't demean the people that do.