[larossmann]

There's at least 50 videos on the channel on any of the issues I consider to be main issues that are 5 minutes or less. The people who make the criticisms you make usually don't watch any of those.

It's not just the 10 minute video they think is boring, it's anything I produce. They're not viewers, they're commenters when something frontpages reddit or hn.

and that's fine - people don't have to watch or like my stuff. I just don't produce content for people who will NEVER watch my stuff. It's like fogo de chao trying to cater to vegans.

I could make this video 30 seconds, but it loses its effect. It loses the story, which is what draws people in who otherwise wouldn't care. Without the history, the details, the villain, and the point - do you honestly believe a 15 short of "hey bro john deere uses gpl stuff and doesn't release it rawr" would have the same effect as this video? Even 10% the effect, of getting normal people to care about farmers getting screwed? I doubt it.

I could be wrong, but as far as "Pushing into mainstream" - it made CBC news, at least half a dozen other news stations, got a 50 page report from the FTC, made it to the president's desk, was mentioned in an executive order, and a bill just passed a week ago.. I don't know how much more mainstream it gets unless the issue gets made into a boy band.

[nebula8804]

To be clear, all I was suggesting was to try that app out and maybe post the results as a "pinned comment" in the hopes that anyone that might click off from the video sees the summary and does not totally disregard it. You make a good point about the successes such as the bill in Colorado and the CBC piece. Maybe I really am asking something totally unreasonable. I don't really know.

Honestly I think we really need someone else to lead and be the public face of this movement. Someone who is known and liked by the mass population. Look at other great movements in this country's history. There is always some character that captures the publics imagination wither through charm or just insane grit.

We can't JUST have a richard stallman like character who sticks to his way of doing things stubbornly and expect to see the finish line. Maybe this movement has already reached escape velocity and it does not matter. Maybe someone at iFixit or someone else that I am not thinking of is already that public face that can reach the masses. Maybe someone is waiting in the wings.

I'm reminded of an event I experienced when I took a senior level Linux Kernel class in college. The class was taught by this hardcore GPL and privacy loving professor who had worked at Bell Labs and had started several startups in the open source/IT sector.

We had a class of 50 people and the first day he told everyone that this class is one of the hardest in the university and that he does not care if you struggle, he would not accommodate you in any way because it is worth learning the Kernel the hard way by being thrown head first into the ocean. He acted with such determination of his way of thinking, that I imagine it really scared a lot of the students. Well, the next class we had lost about 50% of the student body (including the 10 or so women in the class).

It was a grueling class and one of the most knowledgable classes I ever took but now ten years later I look at how the CS graduates i'm hiring at my company now live their entire lives in a smartphone and only use a regular PC when it is absolutely necessary (for work). They barely know how the OS and underlying components in the machine work.

It makes me think, that in hindsight that professor was totally wrong. He caused people who may have dipped their toes into the water and joined the other side to give up too early. Now we have a reduced pool of people who truly understand why all of this matters.

Some of those people might now be like the people I have to hire now. In the case of my developers, they do pretty good work for what they need to do. They don't write kernel code. How many people do that? They build CRUD apps. For these people: The companies won. They live in the Apple/Microsoft/whatever ecosystem and don't care about fundamentals because to them, life is fine. I hope this is not what is going on with right to repair.

Have you watched any Farmer Youtuber channels? I have watched a handful of "Gen-Z" farming youtube channels and I seem to notice there is a lot of love for John Deere since they sponsor social media events here and there. I remember one youtube farming couple in Nebraska discuss right to repair in youtube livestreams when the first news of farmers hacking their equipment made all the tech sites. They seemed quite indifferent to the movement as a whole and discussed how they always have their rep available when they need help. Sure this is an anecdote but it stuck with me because its making me scared that the same thing that I am experiencing with my developer hires is a generation wide problem regardless of industry.

Have we scared off the masses already just like my professor did?