10 ms·

Why designing for open source can be difficult

96 points by gilli 7y ago

eandre 7y ago
I agree with the article and am facing the same challenges in my own startup: how much, and what, to open source? It's a platform that offers a simpler way of building serverless backends [1], and so it's naturally targeting developers. As a developer myself I know how much I appreciate things being open-source and free. At the same time it would come with huge business model challenges in my case and kind of erode what my product is all about (simplicity and having things taken care of for you). While the article does not really offer any answers, I'm curious if anyone else has any experience to offer in this regard? [1] https://encore.dev https://encore.dev
- zomglings 7y ago
  I'm in a similar position as you. Our decision was to open source our underlying framework but none of our infrastructure code: https://github.com/simiotics/shnorky https://github.com/simiotics/shnorky Our customers pay us for peace of mind, which takes work (and automation) beyond the core functionality of the open source product. Happy to discuss further.
ekidd 7y ago
> Adding features and settings is fun and often done without much second thought. In the end, it results in a bloated beast that causes a lot of confusion and frustration, especially among the type of users most open-source projects are missing, the average user who just wants to get things done. A few large open source projects have tried to improve usability by removing features and options. Look at the history of Gnome 1 through 3. Professional UI experts were paid to produce usability advice for Gnome[1], and the Gnome developers responded with the wholesale removal of configuration options across dozens of major programs[2]. Mostly I actually liked this, because I prefer clean programs that I don't have to mess with. But a lot of other users were unhappy, because many desktop Linux users prefer knobs. Which is fine! But what about Windows users and open source applications? Here, success may be more of a mixed blessing. I've heard several open source maintainers say that their Windows users are more likely to get angry with volunteer maintainers, and to display the sorts of behaviors mentioned in [3]. So widespread popularity isn't always a goal. Sometimes people just want to make a niche tool for other enthusiasts. So it's worth asking whether any given project is seriously trying appeal to "the average user who just wants to get things done." Some are, some aren't. [1] https://people.gnome.org/~calum/usability/ut1_report/report_main.html https://people.gnome.org/~calum/usability/ut1_report/report_... [2] https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html [3] https://medium.com/@fommil/the-open-source-entitlement-complex-bcb718e2326d https://medium.com/@fommil/the-open-source-entitlement-compl...
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Sun GNOME Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Sun Microsystems, Inc Do you know the story behind why Sun was doing this work? I had no idea they were involved in this major culture shift in Gnome. I thought they were more invested in CDE. You can see their focus - business users, scientists, creatives - and how that might have led to the current design philosophy of Gnome.
  - bkor 7y ago
    > Do you know the story behind why Sun was doing this work? See e.g. https://www.gnome.org/press/2000/08/sun-joins-gnome-foundation/ https://www.gnome.org/press/2000/08/sun-joins-gnome-foundati.... Quote: > Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced it is joining the GNOME Foundation [..] Sun also announced it will adopt GNOME 2.0 as the future desktop for its Solaris[tm] Operating Environment. Be warned, above announcement is from August 2000.
    - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
      OpenSolaris used Gnome2 by default until Oracle killed it.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        And I believe OpenIndiana is still using MATE as their default DE, which is... sorta funny actually; the fork/continuation of OpenSolaris running the fork/continuation of GNOME 2.
  - ldng 7y ago
    Sun contributed a lot of A11y because they wanted it to pass US regulations on accessibility.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  I don't think there needs to be any friction between "knobs" and "usable design"; in may ways the absence of knobs can be deeply user unfriendly as well. It's all about how well it's designed and explained. Not infrequently a settings page grows and grows until it becomes a chaotic mess, but that's not a problem of the knobs as such, but rather of the design of the settings page. Also, a lot of the times the inline documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps the best example of this are many games where the graphics settings are just a jumble of technical terms with no explanation or even indication what is faster.
comis 7y ago
In general I feel that developers are very poor clients. Designers are better off finding freelance work or donating time to a non-profit they care about imo.
generationP 7y ago
This minimalism fetish is grating. Guess what you need to "just wants to get things done"? Features. If you're in luck, these are standard features, but if not, they will be exotic features that would never be built under that "less is more" philosophy. And it's misleading to think that by only implementing the most popular core features, you'll make the most users happy. Projects often rely on those power users using their software, as these same power users will then advertise it by visibly creating great stuff in it and document it on sites like superuser.stackexchange. Not to mention that while every single exotic feature may only get used by 1% of your userbase, chances are most users will at some point need at least one such feature and would get disappointed by its lack. A lot of highly popular contemporary open-source tools are feature-rich. Foobar, Winamp and VLC are all full of stuff you won't need (but what this stuff is depends on you) and extendable. Notepad++ has perhaps the largest number of menu items I've ever seen in a program. Not to mention browsers (whose feature creep is legitimately dangerous, and yet necessary), classic linux tools, office suites, IDEs, PDF editors... Even in the author's example (a sync tool), I'm not sure I agree. Dropbox with its (relatively) minimalist design was fun until at some point it broke for me (getting stuck in an endless sync loop). With some debug info, I may have found the issue and gotten it to work. The way it was, I just switched to Onedrive. A more reasonable rule is probably "don't include features that could be split off into a separate tool without loss of efficiency or functionality".
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  A great example (IMHO) of presenting the user with only a small subset of the available features is iOS. The tech-literacy bar to make calls, receive texts and install apps is very low, but there are a ton of features hidden for advanced users. Some will complain that these are not discoverable and that’s true but advanced users will often be fine reading the manual and I suppose making them discoverable without confusing the average user is difficult.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    Why would it be difficult? Just hide it in an "advanced" menu or something like that.
laurent123456 7y ago
> part of the reason why more designers don't contribute to open source is that often it requires you to rethink the entire product from the ground up I think that's the key. Unlike software development, where you can improve things here and there incrementally, with design you need to have an overall view of what you want to do, where you want to get, how the final product should look. You can't tweak a margin here, add a border there over time, it doesn't work. And indeed, I suspect that's also why there are so few designers contributing to open source. Anything of value they might suggest often means a big redesign of the app, which nobody will be willing to do. It's a tricky issue, to which there's no easy solution other than spending a lot of time and/or money, both of which are often lacking in open source projects.
- eitland 7y ago
  > I think that's the key. Unlike software development, where you can improve things here and there incrementally, with design you need to have an overall view of what you want to do, where you want to get, how the final product should look. I think many software developers would say exactly the opposite (and I think both would be wrong.) Except the marketing effect of a new UI, do you have literature (or just easy explanations) that would help me understand why this should be the case?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- umvi 7y ago
  > Unlike software development, where you can improve things here and there incrementally, with design you need to have an overall view of what you want to do, where you want to get, how the final product should look. There's a downside to this too though. Take swagger-ui[1] for example. A few years ago I installed it at my company. It was great. Then managers wanted more features, so I peaked into the source and found it wasn't too hard to augment the HTML/JS. I added a search bar to filter HTTP APIs by dynamically altering the JSON document. I added a button to generate a PDF. I added a drop down to select release version from a database. It was quick and easy and hackable. Then they got sponsored and redesigned it from the ground up "professionally" using React. I recently tried to upgrade to the latest version and... the level of complexity has gone up several orders of magnitude. Whereas before I just opened index.html and started hacking, now there isn't an index.html at all. It's all a labyrinthine nest of components and configuration files that somehow get magically compiled and bundled with some build process and I have no idea how to even start porting my features over. I suppose it all makes sense to full-time React developers, but seeing as I mainly work in embedded Linux drivers, I don't really have a desire to learn React since I was previously coerced into learning AngularJS which I now regret. So I guess my point is: if you pull in professional designers to design your FOSS, it may become less accessible and hackable for non-designers like me. [1] https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui
bluetomcat 7y ago
The FOSS development model is best suited for modular software where you have a relatively stable core and dozens of independent plugins for different purposes by different authors, all implementing a well-defined interface. Any new contributor adds stuff in parallel, without being blocked. Other kinds of software which are a particularly good fit are non-end-user-facing middleware and libraries implementing a standard or a protocol. That standard or protocol pretty much describes what the software must do, and FOSS software often becomes the "reference implementation". Think of zlib, libpng, ffmpeg. For the regular monoliths you need a team that is much more well-knit and communication and focus is key. Each unit of code has a lot of dependencies and it can quickly get out of control without any "social" coordination.
- umvi 7y ago
  > and dozens of independent plugins for different purposes by different authors, all implementing a well-defined interface. Any new contributor adds stuff in parallel, without being blocked. This reminds me of Jenkins, which is the most nightmarish piece of software I've ever worked with. The plugins are of such wildly varying quality that it's hard to tell if something broke because of a plugin you just upgraded/installed, because the VM Jenkins is on got upgraded etc. And it's plugins all the way down. Plugins built on plugins. So if you try to file an issue with one plugin, they'll often just point you one plugin down the stack. You get what you pay for, I suppose, and obviously a lot of people like the tool.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Jenkins goes south because the people using the system aren't the people configuring the system. Consider instead a system like emacs, firefox, or mpv. Where the plugins/extensions/scripts are selected and configured by the person who's actually using them. Choosing what they want ignore what they don't, the result is a system that's understood by the person who actually uses it.
  - m_mueller 7y ago
    As an aside, if you have a choice I recommend TeamCity. Much more fully baked than Jenkins - I needed zero plugins to set up the builds we needed.
iwalton3 7y ago
I personally prefer that applications have ideal defaults instead of removing features. It should be easy to pick up an application and use it, but if you want to change something, you should be able to. This can be by using the settings dialog, or for particularly advanced features, by editing a config file. Some users have needs that cannot be met by a bare-bones application, and usually these users depend on Open Source applications that either implement their needs or allow them to change it for their uses.
eitland 7y ago
> I prefer serving the average user who doesn't have time to dive into the settings and tweak everything before he is finally able to use the product. Striving for ease of use removes the need for most settings. Serving average users by providing sensible defaults is a good idea but why does so many think that removing settings is a natural next step? I've joked[0] about making a slide deck and start selling training to every modern software company : > Have your cake and eat it too! > How to please all your customers at once - Combining sensible defaults with the forgotten art of making your software configurable. [0]: https://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach https://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach
- defrex 7y ago
  Multiple configurations are a maintenance burden. So, all else being equal, it's better not to have them. That said, not all else is equal, and configurability can indeed increase the user experience. But if your defaults are so good that very few people take advantage of the settings, you're better off dropping them.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Yep. We mostly agree it seems. Problem is, as the author notes: developers loves to work on these features. I also don't have a problem with devs cutting down unmaintainable mess. My problem is with this general idea that a designer should come in - especially in open source projects - and decide what is and isn't useful. I also guess that some of the problems one see when designers try to join open source projects might be related to this.
  - bityard 7y ago
    At what point does user experience trump the ability to use the software at all in the first place? UX designers are often seduced by reductionism because it makes their lives easier and combined with various hand-wavy aesthetical rationalizations, proceed to ignore several immutable aspects of reality: Developers of an open source project usually have little insight into how their project is actually being used out in the real world. They only know about their use cases and (if they're lucky) that of their co-maintainers and bug reporters. If at some point in time, an option was added to make some piece of the project do "x" instead of "y", it is overwhelmingly likely that the option _was put there for a very good reason_. Just because you don't know the reason doesn't mean one doesn't exist. If the project has more than a few dozen users worldwide, then it is extremely likely that for every UI widget, command-line option, or configuration setting, there is a non-trivial subset of users who rely on that thing being there for their workflow. Remove it, and at best you lose those users. But more often you make them angry as well. When looking at others' code and designs, it is a very human trait to assume that the person who created it didn't know what they were doing and that the way _you_ would do it is better. I get this and I fall into this trap more often than I would like to admit. _But it is almost always wrong_. We often look at the code in a vacuum and don't see the context under which is was written and why it is still there. I've watched this happen time and time again with various open source projects: Person (or team) creates a successful project, maintenance of the project shifts to a new person or group who decide that the old project was "unmaintainable" and decides to a ground-up rewrite into what they _think_ is going to be a better version of the same thing. When in reality, all they have done is written a new, far less useful version of a somewhat similar thing. Citation: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
thrower123 7y ago
At the end of the day, if you want something for open-source, you have to do it yourself or pay somebody to do it. I'm just sick and tired of people bitching and moaning about open-source software and expecting that people will do work for them for free if they castigate the people actually doing the work hard enough.
jbk 7y ago
Oh boy, we're redesigning VLC interface those days, and does this article is spot on on numerous part we've seen. 0. A lot of things are not-intuitive, and we've had to do basic UX and looking at our users to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying). And it took a lot of time... 1. And yes, this requires to rethink some of the basics stuff for VLC usage. 2. And the nerd-porn part is very true: we solved it with 3 layers of access. Simple usage should be direct, Advanced usage for normal users should be within 2 clicks, and Geek/Pro options can be further away. And we will have options for different usage of VLC that will impact a bit the UI (but we're making that as simple as possible, to not make the codebase too complex -> more time) 3. Finally, a lot of things had to be decided without consensus, and that requires leadership that is not the usual way we work. I can share some of the work, if some people care...
- GuiA 7y ago
  > to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying) And it took a lot of time... Don’t worry, good design work takes time by very definition. Telemetry/spying does not magically fix that, and instead tends to lead to worse designs because people miss the forest for the trees. Would love to see the work!
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    Agreed, telemetry is a classic case of "more data is not better data". With a smaller number of organized sessions, you can still collect telemetry (without spying), and you can also collect all sorts of information that telemetry just won't give you. I suspect that a hands-on approach can be cheaper, too. It's just not any fun because it doesn't give you an excuse to play with your company's Snowflake warehouse.
    - thfuran 7y ago
      I think there are certain things that are hard to achieve without telemetry. Like answering the question of "how many users will finally remove (hopefully) deprecated feature X affect?" or "Does anyone actually use this on platform Y?"
jancsika 7y ago
> All this clutter is followed by adding optional themes as a solution to the complaints people have about the user experience, which, in my opinion, can never fix the problems because they go much deeper than the superficial surface, and that is all that a theme can fix. There's one case I've run into where themes are great. That is when one wants to improve a craggy FLOSS interface. Invariably a craggle will ask for an option to turn the ugliness back on and a non-default theme provides the perfect place to do that.
zakum1 7y ago
I don’t think that the “nerd porn” is as negative as the writer believes. If we compare FOSS to proprietary enterprise software we see how little regard proprietary vendors often pay to what engineers need at the expense of adding check-list features that attract “business” decision makers. The ability to enhance, operate, monitor, test are so much stronger in FOSS products because they are written for engineers by engineer. This can of course be taken too far, but it is, IMO, a reason why FOSS can succeed in displacing proprietary technology.
cxr 7y ago
Bibliographic info for that sweet engraving is here: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/corliss-steam-engine/ https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/corliss-s... https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13511601M/Appletons'_cyclopaedia_of_applied_mechanics https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13511601M/Appletons'_cyclopa...
jaredtn 7y ago
I recently released an open-source framework for machine learning debugging. Proper discipline can be the difference between wild success and a your project slowly sinking, like a stone to the bottom of a river. Why? Because a customer adopting your product is risky, dangerous, and uncertain for them. They’re squeezed for time to learn your paradigm. They’re staking their reputation on the line with a boss, coworkers, and company. The great irony is, that by adding features to support one additional customer, you harm the ten customers you already have. Ten happy customers become eleven “okay” customers, then twenty unhappy ones. Make the interface too complex? People will quit. Too many widgets, settings, and knobs will torpedo a project in no time.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bawolff 7y ago
Lots of this rings true, but i disagree about people only want to do the fun things. First of all often what one person considers boring another considers fun. Optimization was used as an example, but often optimization can be really fun (its like a puzzle). More generally, in my experience with an open source project that has both volunteers but a majority of paid devs (MediaWiki), often the volunteers are motivated by making it work well for their niche and will take on really annoying projects important to their niche that have been ignored by the paid devs as not being cost-effective or a priority for whatever reason.

96 points by gilli 7y ago

I agree with the article and am facing the same challenges in my own startup: how much, and what, to open source? It's a platform that offers a simpler way of building serverless backends [1], and so it's naturally targeting developers. As a developer myself I know how much I appreciate things being open-source and free. At the same time it would come with huge business model challenges in my case and kind of erode what my product is all about (simplicity and having things taken care of for you). While the article does not really offer any answers, I'm curious if anyone else has any experience to offer in this regard? [1] https://encore.dev https://encore.dev

zomglings 7y ago
I'm in a similar position as you. Our decision was to open source our underlying framework but none of our infrastructure code: https://github.com/simiotics/shnorky https://github.com/simiotics/shnorky Our customers pay us for peace of mind, which takes work (and automation) beyond the core functionality of the open source product. Happy to discuss further.

ekidd 7y ago

> Adding features and settings is fun and often done without much second thought. In the end, it results in a bloated beast that causes a lot of confusion and frustration, especially among the type of users most open-source projects are missing, the average user who just wants to get things done. A few large open source projects have tried to improve usability by removing features and options. Look at the history of Gnome 1 through 3. Professional UI experts were paid to produce usability advice for Gnome[1], and the Gnome developers responded with the wholesale removal of configuration options across dozens of major programs[2]. Mostly I actually liked this, because I prefer clean programs that I don't have to mess with. But a lot of other users were unhappy, because many desktop Linux users prefer knobs. Which is fine! But what about Windows users and open source applications? Here, success may be more of a mixed blessing. I've heard several open source maintainers say that their Windows users are more likely to get angry with volunteer maintainers, and to display the sorts of behaviors mentioned in [3]. So widespread popularity isn't always a goal. Sometimes people just want to make a niche tool for other enthusiasts. So it's worth asking whether any given project is seriously trying appeal to "the average user who just wants to get things done." Some are, some aren't. [1] https://people.gnome.org/~calum/usability/ut1_report/report_main.html https://people.gnome.org/~calum/usability/ut1_report/report_... [2] https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html [3] https://medium.com/@fommil/the-open-source-entitlement-complex-bcb718e2326d https://medium.com/@fommil/the-open-source-entitlement-compl...

chrisseaton 7y ago
> Sun GNOME Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Sun Microsystems, Inc Do you know the story behind why Sun was doing this work? I had no idea they were involved in this major culture shift in Gnome. I thought they were more invested in CDE. You can see their focus - business users, scientists, creatives - and how that might have led to the current design philosophy of Gnome.
- bkor 7y ago
  > Do you know the story behind why Sun was doing this work? See e.g. https://www.gnome.org/press/2000/08/sun-joins-gnome-foundation/ https://www.gnome.org/press/2000/08/sun-joins-gnome-foundati.... Quote: > Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced it is joining the GNOME Foundation [..] Sun also announced it will adopt GNOME 2.0 as the future desktop for its Solaris[tm] Operating Environment. Be warned, above announcement is from August 2000.
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    OpenSolaris used Gnome2 by default until Oracle killed it.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      And I believe OpenIndiana is still using MATE as their default DE, which is... sorta funny actually; the fork/continuation of OpenSolaris running the fork/continuation of GNOME 2.
- ldng 7y ago
  Sun contributed a lot of A11y because they wanted it to pass US regulations on accessibility.
Carpetsmoker 7y ago
I don't think there needs to be any friction between "knobs" and "usable design"; in may ways the absence of knobs can be deeply user unfriendly as well. It's all about how well it's designed and explained. Not infrequently a settings page grows and grows until it becomes a chaotic mess, but that's not a problem of the knobs as such, but rather of the design of the settings page. Also, a lot of the times the inline documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps the best example of this are many games where the graphics settings are just a jumble of technical terms with no explanation or even indication what is faster.

comis 7y ago

In general I feel that developers are very poor clients. Designers are better off finding freelance work or donating time to a non-profit they care about imo.

generationP 7y ago

This minimalism fetish is grating. Guess what you need to "just wants to get things done"? Features. If you're in luck, these are standard features, but if not, they will be exotic features that would never be built under that "less is more" philosophy. And it's misleading to think that by only implementing the most popular core features, you'll make the most users happy. Projects often rely on those power users using their software, as these same power users will then advertise it by visibly creating great stuff in it and document it on sites like superuser.stackexchange. Not to mention that while every single exotic feature may only get used by 1% of your userbase, chances are most users will at some point need at least one such feature and would get disappointed by its lack. A lot of highly popular contemporary open-source tools are feature-rich. Foobar, Winamp and VLC are all full of stuff you won't need (but what this stuff is depends on you) and extendable. Notepad++ has perhaps the largest number of menu items I've ever seen in a program. Not to mention browsers (whose feature creep is legitimately dangerous, and yet necessary), classic linux tools, office suites, IDEs, PDF editors... Even in the author's example (a sync tool), I'm not sure I agree. Dropbox with its (relatively) minimalist design was fun until at some point it broke for me (getting stuck in an endless sync loop). With some debug info, I may have found the issue and gotten it to work. The way it was, I just switched to Onedrive. A more reasonable rule is probably "don't include features that could be split off into a separate tool without loss of efficiency or functionality".

ghostpepper 7y ago
A great example (IMHO) of presenting the user with only a small subset of the available features is iOS. The tech-literacy bar to make calls, receive texts and install apps is very low, but there are a ton of features hidden for advanced users. Some will complain that these are not discoverable and that’s true but advanced users will often be fine reading the manual and I suppose making them discoverable without confusing the average user is difficult.
- feanaro 7y ago
  Why would it be difficult? Just hide it in an "advanced" menu or something like that.

laurent123456 7y ago

> part of the reason why more designers don't contribute to open source is that often it requires you to rethink the entire product from the ground up I think that's the key. Unlike software development, where you can improve things here and there incrementally, with design you need to have an overall view of what you want to do, where you want to get, how the final product should look. You can't tweak a margin here, add a border there over time, it doesn't work. And indeed, I suspect that's also why there are so few designers contributing to open source. Anything of value they might suggest often means a big redesign of the app, which nobody will be willing to do. It's a tricky issue, to which there's no easy solution other than spending a lot of time and/or money, both of which are often lacking in open source projects.

eitland 7y ago
> I think that's the key. Unlike software development, where you can improve things here and there incrementally, with design you need to have an overall view of what you want to do, where you want to get, how the final product should look. I think many software developers would say exactly the opposite (and I think both would be wrong.) Except the marketing effect of a new UI, do you have literature (or just easy explanations) that would help me understand why this should be the case?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
umvi 7y ago
> Unlike software development, where you can improve things here and there incrementally, with design you need to have an overall view of what you want to do, where you want to get, how the final product should look. There's a downside to this too though. Take swagger-ui[1] for example. A few years ago I installed it at my company. It was great. Then managers wanted more features, so I peaked into the source and found it wasn't too hard to augment the HTML/JS. I added a search bar to filter HTTP APIs by dynamically altering the JSON document. I added a button to generate a PDF. I added a drop down to select release version from a database. It was quick and easy and hackable. Then they got sponsored and redesigned it from the ground up "professionally" using React. I recently tried to upgrade to the latest version and... the level of complexity has gone up several orders of magnitude. Whereas before I just opened index.html and started hacking, now there isn't an index.html at all. It's all a labyrinthine nest of components and configuration files that somehow get magically compiled and bundled with some build process and I have no idea how to even start porting my features over. I suppose it all makes sense to full-time React developers, but seeing as I mainly work in embedded Linux drivers, I don't really have a desire to learn React since I was previously coerced into learning AngularJS which I now regret. So I guess my point is: if you pull in professional designers to design your FOSS, it may become less accessible and hackable for non-designers like me. [1] https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui

bluetomcat 7y ago

The FOSS development model is best suited for modular software where you have a relatively stable core and dozens of independent plugins for different purposes by different authors, all implementing a well-defined interface. Any new contributor adds stuff in parallel, without being blocked. Other kinds of software which are a particularly good fit are non-end-user-facing middleware and libraries implementing a standard or a protocol. That standard or protocol pretty much describes what the software must do, and FOSS software often becomes the "reference implementation". Think of zlib, libpng, ffmpeg. For the regular monoliths you need a team that is much more well-knit and communication and focus is key. Each unit of code has a lot of dependencies and it can quickly get out of control without any "social" coordination.

umvi 7y ago
> and dozens of independent plugins for different purposes by different authors, all implementing a well-defined interface. Any new contributor adds stuff in parallel, without being blocked. This reminds me of Jenkins, which is the most nightmarish piece of software I've ever worked with. The plugins are of such wildly varying quality that it's hard to tell if something broke because of a plugin you just upgraded/installed, because the VM Jenkins is on got upgraded etc. And it's plugins all the way down. Plugins built on plugins. So if you try to file an issue with one plugin, they'll often just point you one plugin down the stack. You get what you pay for, I suppose, and obviously a lot of people like the tool.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Jenkins goes south because the people using the system aren't the people configuring the system. Consider instead a system like emacs, firefox, or mpv. Where the plugins/extensions/scripts are selected and configured by the person who's actually using them. Choosing what they want ignore what they don't, the result is a system that's understood by the person who actually uses it.
- m_mueller 7y ago
  As an aside, if you have a choice I recommend TeamCity. Much more fully baked than Jenkins - I needed zero plugins to set up the builds we needed.

iwalton3 7y ago

I personally prefer that applications have ideal defaults instead of removing features. It should be easy to pick up an application and use it, but if you want to change something, you should be able to. This can be by using the settings dialog, or for particularly advanced features, by editing a config file. Some users have needs that cannot be met by a bare-bones application, and usually these users depend on Open Source applications that either implement their needs or allow them to change it for their uses.

eitland 7y ago

> I prefer serving the average user who doesn't have time to dive into the settings and tweak everything before he is finally able to use the product. Striving for ease of use removes the need for most settings. Serving average users by providing sensible defaults is a good idea but why does so many think that removing settings is a natural next step? I've joked[0] about making a slide deck and start selling training to every modern software company : > Have your cake and eat it too! > How to please all your customers at once - Combining sensible defaults with the forgotten art of making your software configurable. [0]: https://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach https://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach

defrex 7y ago
Multiple configurations are a maintenance burden. So, all else being equal, it's better not to have them. That said, not all else is equal, and configurability can indeed increase the user experience. But if your defaults are so good that very few people take advantage of the settings, you're better off dropping them.
- eitland 7y ago
  Yep. We mostly agree it seems. Problem is, as the author notes: developers loves to work on these features. I also don't have a problem with devs cutting down unmaintainable mess. My problem is with this general idea that a designer should come in - especially in open source projects - and decide what is and isn't useful. I also guess that some of the problems one see when designers try to join open source projects might be related to this.
- bityard 7y ago
  At what point does user experience trump the ability to use the software at all in the first place? UX designers are often seduced by reductionism because it makes their lives easier and combined with various hand-wavy aesthetical rationalizations, proceed to ignore several immutable aspects of reality: Developers of an open source project usually have little insight into how their project is actually being used out in the real world. They only know about their use cases and (if they're lucky) that of their co-maintainers and bug reporters. If at some point in time, an option was added to make some piece of the project do "x" instead of "y", it is overwhelmingly likely that the option _was put there for a very good reason_. Just because you don't know the reason doesn't mean one doesn't exist. If the project has more than a few dozen users worldwide, then it is extremely likely that for every UI widget, command-line option, or configuration setting, there is a non-trivial subset of users who rely on that thing being there for their workflow. Remove it, and at best you lose those users. But more often you make them angry as well. When looking at others' code and designs, it is a very human trait to assume that the person who created it didn't know what they were doing and that the way _you_ would do it is better. I get this and I fall into this trap more often than I would like to admit. _But it is almost always wrong_. We often look at the code in a vacuum and don't see the context under which is was written and why it is still there. I've watched this happen time and time again with various open source projects: Person (or team) creates a successful project, maintenance of the project shifts to a new person or group who decide that the old project was "unmaintainable" and decides to a ground-up rewrite into what they _think_ is going to be a better version of the same thing. When in reality, all they have done is written a new, far less useful version of a somewhat similar thing. Citation: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

thrower123 7y ago

At the end of the day, if you want something for open-source, you have to do it yourself or pay somebody to do it. I'm just sick and tired of people bitching and moaning about open-source software and expecting that people will do work for them for free if they castigate the people actually doing the work hard enough.

jbk 7y ago

Oh boy, we're redesigning VLC interface those days, and does this article is spot on on numerous part we've seen. 0. A lot of things are not-intuitive, and we've had to do basic UX and looking at our users to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying). And it took a lot of time... 1. And yes, this requires to rethink some of the basics stuff for VLC usage. 2. And the nerd-porn part is very true: we solved it with 3 layers of access. Simple usage should be direct, Advanced usage for normal users should be within 2 clicks, and Geek/Pro options can be further away. And we will have options for different usage of VLC that will impact a bit the UI (but we're making that as simple as possible, to not make the codebase too complex -> more time) 3. Finally, a lot of things had to be decided without consensus, and that requires leadership that is not the usual way we work. I can share some of the work, if some people care...

GuiA 7y ago
> to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying) And it took a lot of time... Don’t worry, good design work takes time by very definition. Telemetry/spying does not magically fix that, and instead tends to lead to worse designs because people miss the forest for the trees. Would love to see the work!
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  Agreed, telemetry is a classic case of "more data is not better data". With a smaller number of organized sessions, you can still collect telemetry (without spying), and you can also collect all sorts of information that telemetry just won't give you. I suspect that a hands-on approach can be cheaper, too. It's just not any fun because it doesn't give you an excuse to play with your company's Snowflake warehouse.
  - thfuran 7y ago
    I think there are certain things that are hard to achieve without telemetry. Like answering the question of "how many users will finally remove (hopefully) deprecated feature X affect?" or "Does anyone actually use this on platform Y?"

jancsika 7y ago

> All this clutter is followed by adding optional themes as a solution to the complaints people have about the user experience, which, in my opinion, can never fix the problems because they go much deeper than the superficial surface, and that is all that a theme can fix. There's one case I've run into where themes are great. That is when one wants to improve a craggy FLOSS interface. Invariably a craggle will ask for an option to turn the ugliness back on and a non-default theme provides the perfect place to do that.

zakum1 7y ago

I don’t think that the “nerd porn” is as negative as the writer believes. If we compare FOSS to proprietary enterprise software we see how little regard proprietary vendors often pay to what engineers need at the expense of adding check-list features that attract “business” decision makers. The ability to enhance, operate, monitor, test are so much stronger in FOSS products because they are written for engineers by engineer. This can of course be taken too far, but it is, IMO, a reason why FOSS can succeed in displacing proprietary technology.

cxr 7y ago

Bibliographic info for that sweet engraving is here: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/corliss-steam-engine/ https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/corliss-s... https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13511601M/Appletons'_cyclopaedia_of_applied_mechanics https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13511601M/Appletons'_cyclopa...

jaredtn 7y ago

I recently released an open-source framework for machine learning debugging. Proper discipline can be the difference between wild success and a your project slowly sinking, like a stone to the bottom of a river. Why? Because a customer adopting your product is risky, dangerous, and uncertain for them. They’re squeezed for time to learn your paradigm. They’re staking their reputation on the line with a boss, coworkers, and company. The great irony is, that by adding features to support one additional customer, you harm the ten customers you already have. Ten happy customers become eleven “okay” customers, then twenty unhappy ones. Make the interface too complex? People will quit. Too many widgets, settings, and knobs will torpedo a project in no time.

deleted 7y ago

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bawolff 7y ago

Lots of this rings true, but i disagree about people only want to do the fun things. First of all often what one person considers boring another considers fun. Optimization was used as an example, but often optimization can be really fun (its like a puzzle). More generally, in my experience with an open source project that has both volunteers but a majority of paid devs (MediaWiki), often the volunteers are motivated by making it work well for their niche and will take on really annoying projects important to their niche that have been ignored by the paid devs as not being cost-effective or a priority for whatever reason.