Re: Fundamental issues with open source software

On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 23:19, Trent Shipley wrote:
> In theory it might be possible to get the industrial design and engineering
> folks to contribute to a FOSS project. You might even get technical writers
> to contribute. Presumably they would do so for many of the same reasons as
> the hackers contribute code. (Except that NOBODY thinks technical writing is
> fun. Also, most marketing and usability research CANNOT be done for free.)
>
> Even if a project COULD get reasonable documentation, marketing, and usability
> contributions, it would make no difference in the results produced in a
> classic bazzar style project developed by cowboy hackers. The developers
> would take the contributions of the marketeers and usability folks as
> (annoying) guidelines. That is, they would mostly ignore them. They would
> spend too little time with the technical writers, and release applications
> without waiting for updated documentation (since documentation necessarilly
> lags development).

I think the critical assumption that you are making here is that the
volunteers just want to make software for their own use. Many want to
make software for everyone's use - and this implies that it should be
easy to use and well documented.

I think if you look at things like the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
- they were developed with extensive consultation with human interface
experts and are adhered by religiously within the GNOME project. Many
projects that are on the periphery of GNOME also choose to use those
guidelines to make their own programs easier to use.

The same goes with documentation and internationalization. If your
'cowboy hackers' were the only ones doing software neither of these
would be reasonable. Both happen regularly in open source (though,
always more can be done).

So yeah, no one is making developers do any of this stuff - but it comes
down to a market driven system. The popular applications are the ones
that people can figure out how to use. Those are the ones that take
these things into consideration.

        --Ted