Coping

Since technology of this sort has moved to an everyday occurrence, we are rarely aware of what happens behind the scenes. In fact, we cannot be aware of every small detail if we are to use the technology effectively and efficiently. However, in the closed source world, we are unable to just look under the hood to see exactly what is happening.

This powerlessness is the very reason why we are prey to such failures in computer technology, and yet continue. To compensate for our incapacity to fix the program, we cope and rationalise. We may rationalise the failure in several ways:

1. ``computer programs are bound to have bugs and we should just deal with it.''
2. ``the computer has helped me in x ways. This is just a price we pay.''
3. ``they are still working out the bugs, I'll buy the upgrade to fix it.''
4. ``I really don't have much of an option, I'll just wait for the next version.''

There may be many variations of these four statements, but their rationale all conclude one or both of the following: buy a newer version (hoping that the newer version fixes the old problem); deal with the issue by ignoring it.

In order for the computer user to embrace Open Source (along with the implications of altruism,) they must go beyond these types of excuses for technology failure. These four arguments above can be addressed in the following ways.