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While this is true, it also remains true that open source is largely incapable of producing anything non-technical people want to use. The very few exceptions a

by api 3y ago

While this is true, it also remains true that open source is largely incapable of producing anything non-technical people want to use. The very few exceptions are straight clones of commercial products. I think this failure is more what the article is getting at. What’s under the hood may be shit in many commercial products, in the end they ship something people can use. In the end most users don’t care that the code looks ugly or that the design is messy and full of suboptimal choices. They care that it works and more importantly is usable for them.

bawolff 3y ago
While i agree somewhat, i also think there is some survivorship bias here Commercial products that fail to find product-market fit die and disappear from the universe. Open source products that fail just limp along forever in github. OTOH, i do really believe that good UX is very hard to do without a strong authority in charge, which FOSS often (but not necessarily) lacks.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Except for, say, Wikipedia, Firefox, and Audacity, off the top of my head. Though I'd really like to see what application areas, types of software, and specific instances you have in mind. The "real people" I encounter rarely venture outside a Web browser and, sometimes, an email app. Most "software" they use are Web apps. And the times I've introduced Free Software alternatives in an environment where they're supported and promoted ... Free Software is in fact often highly useable. The issue to me seems far less one of utility than of business models: - Desktop operating systems were dominated by a convicted anti-trust-violating monpoly, which tied (and still largely controls through strong vendor relations) PC sales directly with OS licenses, the infamous "Microsoft Tax". - "Office Suite" sales were ... tied to that same desktop monopoly. - With Web 2.0, AJAX-based Web apps and Software as a Service came to dominate major markets, most especially Web Search, but also email, maps, messaging, social media, online video, and the like. Software isn't sold so much as it's advertising supported, which is to say that there's a business model tied to proprietary development models. In much of this space there are also F/OSS alternatives, but network effects come to be a dominant factor, as well as interlocking monopolies (e.g., Web Search, online advertising, browser, and email, in the case of Google). Again, it's business models which drive the capacity to amass and direct immense capital flows, rather than F/OSS development itself, and several of the tools mentioned are in fact Free Software, most notably the Chromium branch of the Google Chrome Browser. Mozilla's Firefox is functionally comparable or superior to Chrome in many aspects, and is itself Free Software. - In terms of overall usage, mobile devices dominate, and the principle issue here is that App Stores again tend to incentivise and favour proprietary apps. The ten most-used Android apps are Google Play Store (largely integral to Android), Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram (FB), Amazon, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and Netflix. Four of those belong to Google, three to Facebook. All are SaaS offerings, though Gmail could be substituted by a third-party email app. The picture for iOS is generally comparable. It is tremendously difficult to disentangle development methodology from business model and attendant access to capital, regards UI/UX quality; and given that several of the cases I'm listing here are F/OSS applications or software, I'd say your handwave is fairly strongly refuted.

by api 3y ago

bawolff 3y ago

While i agree somewhat, i also think there is some survivorship bias here Commercial products that fail to find product-market fit die and disappear from the universe. Open source products that fail just limp along forever in github. OTOH, i do really believe that good UX is very hard to do without a strong authority in charge, which FOSS often (but not necessarily) lacks.

dredmorbius 3y ago

Except for, say, Wikipedia, Firefox, and Audacity, off the top of my head. Though I'd really like to see what application areas, types of software, and specific instances you have in mind. The "real people" I encounter rarely venture outside a Web browser and, sometimes, an email app. Most "software" they use are Web apps. And the times I've introduced Free Software alternatives in an environment where they're supported and promoted ... Free Software is in fact often highly useable. The issue to me seems far less one of utility than of business models: - Desktop operating systems were dominated by a convicted anti-trust-violating monpoly, which tied (and still largely controls through strong vendor relations) PC sales directly with OS licenses, the infamous "Microsoft Tax". - "Office Suite" sales were ... tied to that same desktop monopoly. - With Web 2.0, AJAX-based Web apps and Software as a Service came to dominate major markets, most especially Web Search, but also email, maps, messaging, social media, online video, and the like. Software isn't sold so much as it's advertising supported, which is to say that there's a business model tied to proprietary development models. In much of this space there are also F/OSS alternatives, but network effects come to be a dominant factor, as well as interlocking monopolies (e.g., Web Search, online advertising, browser, and email, in the case of Google). Again, it's business models which drive the capacity to amass and direct immense capital flows, rather than F/OSS development itself, and several of the tools mentioned are in fact Free Software, most notably the Chromium branch of the Google Chrome Browser. Mozilla's Firefox is functionally comparable or superior to Chrome in many aspects, and is itself Free Software. - In terms of overall usage, mobile devices dominate, and the principle issue here is that App Stores again tend to incentivise and favour proprietary apps. The ten most-used Android apps are Google Play Store (largely integral to Android), Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram (FB), Amazon, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and Netflix. Four of those belong to Google, three to Facebook. All are SaaS offerings, though Gmail could be substituted by a third-party email app. The picture for iOS is generally comparable. It is tremendously difficult to disentangle development methodology from business model and attendant access to capital, regards UI/UX quality; and given that several of the cases I'm listing here are F/OSS applications or software, I'd say your handwave is fairly strongly refuted.