Maybe open-source does actually need marketing and an appearance of quality and modernity to 'succeed', whether you like it or not. Code quality or complexity i

Maybe open-source does actually need marketing and an appearance of quality and modernity to 'succeed', whether you like it or not. Code quality or complexity is often invisible and largely irrelevant to end-users (as long as the tool does the job), and it's a known fact of life that people are (at least initially) attracted to things that look good. If I just look at myself as someone who's been using OSS for years, and absolutely depends on tools like gcc for my day-to-day work, even despite all that I still sometimes find myself discarding certain OSS software solutions I have no prior experience with, for nothing else but a crappy amateurish logo or an ugly website. I know it doesn't say anything about how good the software is, but somehow it's an instinctive reaction, which I think is pretty universal among humans. In a broader sense, if you look at some of the reactions this article seems to trigger, I think you can safely see that tunnel-vision and a complete disregard of the differences between OSS developers and potential OSS users is a huge missed opportunity. You can be confident in the quality, complexity and utility of a piece of software whatever you like, but that doesn't 'sell' it to end-users. If OSS wants broader acceptence and ever become a real-alternative to commercial software it needs superficial polish and marketing. This may not be relevant for compilers or debuggers, but it is relevant for tools facing non-developer end-users.