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You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone - Al Capone
Linux will fall flat on its face - report
In First Monday, Michelle Levesque said that the Open Source concept fails because of its "user-interface design, documentation, feature-centric development, programming for the self and religious blindness".
She warned that Open Source will remain an unknown quantity to most computer users until these problems were addressed.
Levesque, a researcher for the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies in Canada, said there was a lack of intuition in user interfaces, probably because geeks gave more weight to integrity rather than beauty.
She added that the geeks thought they systems they were designed were intuitive enough for them and that user interface design wasn't real work. Which made it impossible to be popular with regular users who needed an intuitive interface.
"What the user will see - and what they'll judge the project based on - is the user interface. If it's inadequate, no one outside of other geeks will touch the program," she wrote.
She added that open source projects had a big problem with documentation - "if they provide any documentation at all." She blames this on a lack of contractual responsibility.
"Imagine what the following sentence looks like to someone who knows little about Unix and is installing it for the first time: 'You will need a list of MD5 checksums for the binary files. If you have the md5sum program, you can ensure that your files are not corrupt by running md5sum -v -c md5sum.txt'," she wrote.
Levesque said that open source programmers tended to be dismissive of proprietary software and miss out on some of the good things it does.
"There are still many things which software available for the Windows operating system does better than any present Unix-based system. Rather than admit that Windows is ahead in some areas, the tendency is to just ignore those particular areas.
"Likewise, since Apple has had so much success with Mac OS X, the open source community should be investing significant amounts of time and effort into cloning Apple's good work, rather than insisting that Gnome and KDE are just as useful," she wrote. ยต
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While some of her points may apply to the Linux desktop, they certainly don't apply to much else.
With regards to usability:
Microsoft and Apple invest a *lot* of money in usability testing and interface design. I think what we really need to see is more usability experts contributing to Open Source.
"cloning Apple's good work" wouldn't work either, since Apple and Microsoft alone file *thousands* of patent applications every year. Software patents hurt open software.
With regards to the documentation bit:
Unix? End users don't install UNIX!
I could go on for hours...
Don't pay any attention to this article.
Considering open source software is what she is talking about and what we are interested. It is interesting People are approaching this author with a CLOSED MIND. Windows programmers used to do the same thing. Those who remember dos and the instructions that needed to be typed to get something done. Sure, if you did that system work every day it was easy, but for those of us who only entered commands occasionally, maybe once a year, the commands were difficult to remember. The techies writing the software always assumed people would know or should know. Or that they should hire a techie to FIX their computer. Considering all of the conflicts that would occur in those days between hardware and the software problems, and those conflicts and how that would cause the system to blow up. It was not until Microsoft began to make software user friendly with windows 95 and then 2000 and then xp that people could relax just a bit at their monitor.
Personally i think this writer is ABSOLUTELY right. Techies should be open minded about their open source. I am not a puter person but am pretty good about building computers for my office and installing hardware and software. Even so i would not know what to do with that command. I intend to become familiar with linux but i also know the learning curve is going to be high, like going back to the dos days.