Maybe usability hasn't been a priority for much of the OSS community because there's no driving commercial reason to worry about it. If I want to sell a general-purpose piece of software, I want it to meet the needs of as many people as possible: I'd rather sell into a target market of 100 million "regular people" than a million computer experts. An OSS developer, on the other hand, is rewarded by the compliments of a (relatively) small but appreciative audience that, like him, values power and flexibility over short-term ease of use.
Many developers have contempt for people who aren't particularly interested in computers, but just want to use them to get a job done. They wrongly equate intelligence with computing expertise: people who don't know how to edit configuration files are just stupid and not worth their time to worry about. In a commercial software company, the marketing department, for all its legendary faults, must try to keep this attitude from being reflected in the products. No similar control mechanism is in place in the OSS world.
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Maybe usability hasn't been a priority for much of the OSS community because there's no driving commercial reason to worry about it. If I want to sell a general-purpose piece of software, I want it to meet the needs of as many people as possible: I'd rather sell into a target market of 100 million "regular people" than a million computer experts. An OSS developer, on the other hand, is rewarded by the compliments of a (relatively) small but appreciative audience that, like him, values power and flexibility over short-term ease of use.
Many developers have contempt for people who aren't particularly interested in computers, but just want to use them to get a job done. They wrongly equate intelligence with computing expertise: people who don't know how to edit configuration files are just stupid and not worth their time to worry about. In a commercial software company, the marketing department, for all its legendary faults, must try to keep this attitude from being reflected in the products. No similar control mechanism is in place in the OSS world.