This is where open source is an unsung hero continually advancing not just the computer skills but the really advanced stuff. This study finds only 5% of adults can do what they call complex tasks like navigating and filling out forms in a browser, while 69% could barely work for Uber, barely use Uber, or not even figure out Uber. Open source is sitting there teaching and training people how to create Uber.
I fail to see what open-source software has to do with this data. If someone is unable to move their mouse pointer to the Delete icon of an email client, the license of the software likely has no effect.
Learning how to use, configure and create open source is definitely one of the highest-proficiency forms of computer usage. Especially creating but even using open source requires a bevvy of advanced skills identifying appropriate software and getting it to run. The strongest 5% of computer users they found can barely search email and some % are pursuing incredibly sophisticated skills through open source setting up their own email server or writing one. That's the relevancy.
This study stopped counting at 3rd level with multipage forms basically... what’s a Linux terminal or git or swift or json/yaml configuration files if not highly advanced computer usage. 3rd, 4th, 5th, 100th, somewhere up there is a proficiency-level where you build your own computer in Minecraft for the fun of it and write languages and operating systems and these skills are learned and shared through open source more than anything.
I think if they had kept tracking the higher levels of proficiency by the time they got to open source users and developers there is a chasm between their ability to use computers to solve problems vs the 3rd-level person - data munging, web scraping, scripting, machine learning, advanced internet searching, bespoke software...
> Learning how to use, configure and create open source is definitely one of the highest-proficiency forms of computer usage.
Some of the most successful accountants, CFO's, and stakeholders I have met would beg to differ.
> I think if they had kept tracking the higher levels of proficiency by the time they got to open source users and developers there is a chasm between their ability to use computers to solve problems vs the 3rd-level person ...
This is a straw man argument[0]. OSS != "higher levels of [computer] proficiency".
Look at the steps to set up WordPress. These steps can impart a lot of knowledge on the people following them. There are classical models of learning that seem very applicable - learning by doing, experiential learning and rote learning. The article is very clear society doesn't make highly proficient computer users, so if using open source doesn't create them where could they possibly be coming from?
Solving problems can be done in many ways. I reach first for OSS myself, but that's just me. Others solve the problems they must with tools which are not OSS.
What matters most is solving the problem at hand, not what tools are used.
I'm just a random Internet account, trying to impart a bit of perspective. Do with it what you shall.
I'm taking the position that open source is how advanced computer skills are learned today, through trying to use it, configure it, host it, maintain it, write it etc.
Just look at the steps for setting up WordPress, it's a 101-level project on internet and web hosting. Reading and writing open source is a vital part of how people learn to use highly-advanced tools. I think this education is a really overlooked benefit of open source.
Free Software doesn't have to compete on marketshare. It may well benefit in terms of mindshare by favouring advanced users. Taking as an example Linux, with still single-digit usershare among operating systems, there is sufficient user-share among potential contributors to support the several thousand kernal contributors, as well as contributions to a wide range of system, userland, and GUI tools.
Given the focus drift that's accumulated from even modest popularity among some Linux distros, and meant not as a critical note, just a set of observations over my own several decades' experience, more technical Linux and BSD variants tend toward more technical users, whilst the more user-friendly distros (Mandrake, back in the day, Ubuntu, Mint, Cinnamon, etc.) tend to show a greater aversion to CLI and system tools, in favour of GUIs and the like.
Because commercial software does see massive network effects and attraction to mass markets, it tends to fall far lower on the user-capability curve.
This can also hit mass-market free software, with Chromium and Android (dismissing status as truly Free Software / Open Source) being cases that readily come to mind. The mechanism here is that these are aimed at advertising-promotion platforms, and hence, mass markets (Android devices number in the billions). Which is to say the polar opposite of intellectually-rewarding power-user tools.
It's not that the users' skills depend on the software licence, it's that licencing determines business interests and user-focus of the software developer.
How is Open Source sitting there teaching people how to use large amounts of investor money to perform regulatory arbitrage at international scale, breaking laws in country after country and getting away with it because you move fast and break things (and are based in a country surrounded by nuclear aircraft carriers)?
Oh wait, you mean create an app for a taxi network?
