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Five Fundamental Problems with Open Source?

Posted by Cliff on from the stuff-to-talk-about dept.

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."

1 of 814 comments (clear)

  1. My thoughts by gregfortune · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1) User interface design

    Good UI design is hard. A good UI designer might not even be able to code and hardcore coders generally don't make very good UI designers. It's simply not what they're interested in and so it gets only as much time and effort as is absolutely necessary. We, as a community have built some wonderful code, but not many in the community are actually UI designers. We need to find and motivate more of these people.

    2) Documentation

    Documentation is time consuming and not very rewarding for coders. As with UI designers, we need a large group of people who get kicks out of writing documentation and there are just too few of those special people. We need more of these people too. Trusting these tasks to the coders isn't enough.

    3) Feature-centric development

    Features are rewarding for developers and guess where they put their time.. Project managers are meant to drive the scope and direction of a project. Most of time, the project manager is the lead coder by default. Got to entice a few of these management types over too..

    4) Programming for the self

    This has an almost identical effect to #1 and the solution is the same. People who are good at usability issues must be found and enticed to contribute. Unfortuantely, we don't have much to offer in reward. Recognition? Nope... The coders/project managers get the credit for the released program. Money? Nope.. We're not talking about commercial software. Beer and Pizza? That's probably our best shot, but I'm not convinced.

    5) Religious blindness

    Blatently wrong, at least for a significant population of the community. Quite of few recent articles soundly debunk this.

    So, it's not going to "fix" itself and there is not much we can do to alter the situation. People are doing this for fun. If it's fun to work on features rather than write documentation, that's what they'll do. Commercial software will always have an advantage in this respect because people are paid to do the work they don't enjoy.