Being free is hard. I once read that people would rather be held within the confines of proprietary software and SaaS‘s comforting embrace rather than trudge along in the rocky path of freedom.
“I can’t get Skrype to work on this.”
“My friends are all in Facebork.”
“WTH, I can’t watch Frash on this!”
“No way! I can’t play my MMOs on this?”
One of the first things some Free Software users would say is: “That’s non-free software and you should stop using it.” The usual reaction by the non-free user would be to shun them, thinking that they are religious zealots, and having impractical ideas in today’s technology. But if they grew in a background full of Windrows and non-free software, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that those are the ONLY things that they are looking for.
Instead of berating them, it would be best to inform them of other alternatives.
“You can use Ekiga.”
“There’s Identica for that.”
“Well, most video sites are in HTML5 nowadays.”
“Have you tried Ryzom?”
If they like them, than you’ve won half of the battle already. Once they get a hang of it, tell them why it’s important. At first they will resist, as most users aren’t developers and they won’t see the reason why the four freedoms are important. Inform them of the possible security and privacy problems that proprietary software has, and how it’s so inflexible that waiting for a patch depends so much on the original devs only.
It takes time to unlearn these things: “old habits die hard” as they say. It’s like expecting a drug addict to be cured over night by going cold turkey–it won’t happen. My suggestion is to slowly wean them away from non-free software until it’s totally out of their system. That’s why most of them first drift to Open Source rather than straight to Free Software. Consider it as a halfway house before going to freedom. There will be some challenges along the way, but don’t give up.