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Five Fundamental Problems with Open Source?
meriksen asks: "I found a very interesting paper which I am sure will stir up a hornets nest.
Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems." What do you think of the issues given in this paper, and how do you think the Open Source community should address these issues?
"The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary software's more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to lack the complete and accessible documentation that retains users. Developers focus on features in their software, rather than ensuring that they have a solid core. Open Source programmers also tend to program with themselves as an intended audience, rather than the general public. Lastly, there is a widely known stubbornness by Open Source programmers in refusing to learn from what lessons proprietary software has to offer. If Open Source software wishes to become widely used and embraced by the general public, all five of these issues will have to be overcome."
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Unfortunately, in a capitalist economy it's very hard for such an altruistic idea as open source (and free software? nothing's free!) to compete with big business.
Or checking to see if it actually DOES run IIS?
Sheesh.
Actually, according to www.netcraft.com, its running WebSTAR on Mac OS.
My Quadra 950 can beat up your honor student.
1. Improving and is nearly a non-issue these days
2. Documentation is more plentiful then most 'closed source' groups. If having less 'Dummy' books means less documentation, it's a negative I can live with
3. Doesn't MS Office count as a Feature-centric project? You can really put MSOffice in place of 'ProjectX' and it would sound the same
4. Sounds like a crappy project to me if the developers know of the problems but don't fix them.
5. There are lots of egotistical elitests, but I've noticed in the wild that there are less now then a couple years ago. If you punch everyone in the face and they all leave, don't be suprised when there is no one left to punch.
Overall it sounds like this guy had a bad experiance with A single project and decided to generalize it with all Open Source. I'd be nice to know what ProjectX is, then we all can get on them over it.
The Notes section seems to get the highlight of the paper.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Availability.
Most people simply don't know that GIMP and OppenOffice exist. Or that they can be installed on Windows fairly easily.
Installation.
Some open-source developers just assume that you'll have a compiler handy, and will want to adjust the Makefile to point to the right libraries (which you'll have to compile and install yourself...).
-... ---
here
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/
Seriously. All the documentation you could ask for, and then more.
I have to say that I'm still a little confused. If the author is referring to Open Source Software, but not Free Software (as you stated, a subset), and not packages that vendors have released as Open Source, it seems to me that they've handily reduced the scope of their statement while keeping the moniker of Open Source Software so they can bash on it.
"...buy me an acre of land,
between the salt water and the sea strand."
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
The reason they're OSS-specific is because commercial software developers can and do provide incentives and motivation (in the form of paychecks) to do the boring stuff. They (we) in turn can do that because they're being paid by their customers to do so.
I disagree with your implication that the problem is symmetrical. While it is true that anyone can pick out a few counterexamples, the truth is that in commercial software, products with poor UI/documentation/boring stuff begin to suffer as soon as a more usable alternative shows up (sometimes even when it has fewer/weaker features). There is no such built-in forced-evolution environment in OSS -- the software is usable enough for the people who have the power to do anything about it, and that's the end of the matter.
As an example, take what happened with Word and WordPerfect back in the early mid 90's. No, Word did not demolish WordPerfect solely on the basis of Microsoft's considerable marketing prowess, although that was certainly involved. Rather, WordPerfect had a dominant market position, almost a monopoly, but they dragged their feet developing a GUI (Windows 3.1) version of the product after Microsoft released Word 1.0. I don't recall how long it took WordPerfect to come out with a GUI version, but I remember a) thinking it took a long time, and b) Word garnering high marks in the press for its slick (at the time) interface even though it got dinged for having fewer features. Microsoft kept cranking, and released Office. Even back then they made a point of having some semblance of commonality in the menu structure and hotkeys across the applications in the suite. When WordPerfect eventually released their own GUI suite, the reviews in the press were distinctly critical of the differing menus and hotkeys across the apps.
These things matter. If OSS does not find a way to address them, OSS developers will continue to fight an uphill battle. It's still a fightable battle, of course: Eventually the cost of the extra training corporations must invest in order to use OSS will become smaller than the price they pay for commercial software. Microsoft Office is not cheap...
Bandannarama