Will Open Source Ever Become Mainstream?

Prabhu Ramachandran asks: "I am a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and as part of a course project I am trying to gather comments on the following question: Will the Open Source and Free Software communities develop software that will find widespread adoption amongst the mainstream, or is such software, by its nature, suitable only for sophisticated users? As part of my literature survey I found an academic perspective that seemed to indicate that open source projects do not reach the mainstream because the developers tend to listen only to their smartest customers. There also seems to be a lack of detailed documentation and an easy-to-use interface which normally attract the not-so-sophisticated users. I would like to hear the thoughts of Open Source developers and others on this issue. If you would like to view my references or the comments posted on a website hosted for this purpose, please visit my website." There have already been some interesting comments posted on his website. What is your take on this issue?

Comments

Buzzwords?

[Lonath]

First it was shared source. Now it's open value? Is it me or does it look like Microsoft is trying to co-opt the words "open" and "source" to confuse people? I'll bet this is what's happening.

WTF does "open value" mean anyway? The word open doesn't belong there at all. I wonder if we'll ever see the internal memos where they admit that since they can't win on the issues, they'll just muddy the waters by slinging the "open" "source" words around in different ways to see what sticks.

Coming soon: Microsoft: We're the trustworthy always open source for your business!

Re:It IS mainstream already

[IdleTime]

Ummmm... You said use OSX. As far as I know, it is still not Open Source.

The article talked about Open Source, not your personal preference for OSX which is very closed.