Another metaphor: "Linux is open and free, it can be a major desktop OS if everyone just switched to it, but because they haven't they obviously don't care for it."
Not to go off on a tangent but what you said is true, most people don't care about Linux...or Windows, or MacOS. They have a general apathy to whatever desktop OS they use, with a slight bias to whatever they used last. People just want to use the applications they want and need.
Perhaps the same statement would apply to workplace control. Most people have a general apathy to their workplace governance and only care about their pay and benefits.
I really don't know how you make people care about things, but compelling a change that people are free to make today by government force is last on my list of things to try.
My overall point is that there are many examples of the dominant players in a market being inferior in certain ways compared to more obscure choices, and there are different reasons for it. Cooperatives and alternative corporate governance models are simply less well-known, not unlike the average consumer hasn't even heard of Linux. They don't know the benefits involved in these alternate models. You can extend to many other categories where there are superior, but obscurer, alternatives that come with trade-offs.
There's also situations where dominant players make it difficult for smaller competitors to survive. In a loose analogy, Microsoft's monopolistic strategies in the '90s can be compared to the past decades' weakening of laws protecting unions.
Strengthening unions, or rather reversing the weakening of unions in this country, doesn't really require oppressive government force. That's in line with the misconception that considers America's sickly unions- who are an absolute paper tiger at this point in history- to have any considerable strength.
In terms of not crashing, fewer security issues, no telemetry, or having to pay money for it, sure. Point is it's an alternative that could potentially serve the needs of some users better than Windows does, but will likely never be considered by them just because it's almost unknown to the general public. I'm sure better examples exist.
Sure, but the point is that it's possible for a market to be dominated by a brand- or, in our original discussion, by a way of thinking or governing- that might be inferior to a lesser known choice.
There are a good number of hackers who would consider Linux superior to the dominant OS's, which is why I made that arbitrary comparison.
>I really don't know how you make people care about things
To follow your tangent, I actually did a little bit of not terribly formal research on this at one point (maybe about 15 years ago now), calling up a variety of people in different volunteer organizations and asking them about their background and motivation for their volunteer work.
Generally, the anecdotes I gathered all roughly corresponded with their volunteer work tying in in some way with other facets of their lives.
For example, a man who had received books in prison from a volunteer organization joined that organization after he got out because he believed in the value of what they were doing. A mom volunteered on an organization that arranged activities for kids, which hers participated in. That sort of thing.
My takeaway was not terribly revolutionary: you can't -make- someone care about things, but their circumstances will increase the chance that they will care about related things.
