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You can also get great usability from a lead developer with taste, and people that are actually interested in using the software. Profit is certainly not the o
by ori_b 17y ago
You can also get great usability from a lead developer with taste, and people that are actually interested in using the software.
Profit is certainly not the only incentive that drives people. Saving time and effort by fixing problems (usability and otherwise) is also a great motivator.
- rjurney 17y agoAnd yet it never works out that way on very many projects. Why is that?
- ori_b 17y agoI disagree. It certainly does happen, and there is plenty of usable open source out there, and lots of patches from users that increased usability. The problem is that it's hard to find people with taste. But this is true no matter what development model is used. Toss in a lower barrier to entry with open source, and you end up with junk at the bottom. I suspect that if you took the top N proprietary and open source apps, you wouldn't find a usability difference. The average would only get dragged down if you include the half-finished releases of open source stuff that would never have made it to market in a proprietary environment.
- bct 17y agoFor the same reasons that very few non-open projects have the kind of usability you're talking about.
- rjurney 17y agoGreat commercial software has good usability because they pay good usability people. These people aren't as likely to donate their time to a FOSS project as are hackers who can code raw functionality.
- cschwarm 17y agoTrue. But for Open Source projects, having a lead developer with taste is a matter of chance. And people using the software usually don't care about the "no-users" but only their own wants and needs. In contrast, Closed Source products simply hire a professional interface designer if that's necessary to convince "no-users" to buy.
- access_denied 17y agoHow many lead devels on OSS projects would bend before a pro UID who would contribute to the project?
- bct 17y agoThere are projects for which mainstream UI design is unsuited or unimportant, and there are undoubtedly a few people whose egos would prevent it. Apart from those, I would expect most projects would be happy to accept advice if the UID demonstrated competence.
- access_denied 17y agoThan how do we get UIDs to contribute to OSS?
- ori_b 17y agoAt a guess, a large number of them.