Five Fundamental Problems with Open Source?

meriksen asks: "I found a very interesting paper which I am sure will stir up a hornets nest. Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems." What do you think of the issues given in this paper, and how do you think the Open Source community should address these issues?

"The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary software's more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to lack the complete and accessible documentation that retains users. Developers focus on features in their software, rather than ensuring that they have a solid core. Open Source programmers also tend to program with themselves as an intended audience, rather than the general public. Lastly, there is a widely known stubbornness by Open Source programmers in refusing to learn from what lessons proprietary software has to offer. If Open Source software wishes to become widely used and embraced by the general public, all five of these issues will have to be overcome."

Re:But...

[Liselle]

Okay, you're being funny, but read the footnote at the bottom of the paper:

In this paper, I use the general term Open Source, though often I'm exclusively discussing Free Software. As well, when I use the term Open Source projects, I'm usually referring to projects that have a contribution base wider than one or two individuals. I'm also aware that some companies release Open Source versions of their software, and though I certainly appreciate their donation, I'm excluding these Open Source projects in this particular paper's definition of Open Source, as some of my statements do not apply to them. I made these generalizations for the point of simplification, and not for any political motivations.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The webserver shoulda been running apache...

[soupart]

How about you try clicking the link?

Or checking to see [netcraft.com] if it actually DOES run IIS?

Sheesh.

Re:The webserver shoulda been running apache...

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Guess you didn't read the article either hmmm? The writer is *female*.

And furthermore, I want to see them fix "easily" (your words) the horrible User Interface that is Linux.

Re:The webserver shoulda been running apache...

[PudKaplan]

Actually, according to www.netcraft.com, its running WebSTAR on Mac OS.

article text: (posted AC to advoid Karma whoring)

[Anonymous Coward]

[firstmonday.org]

[slashdot.org]

Fundamental issues with open source software development by Michelle Levesque

Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems. The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary softwares more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to lack the complete and accessible documentation that retains users. Developers focus on features in their software, rather than ensuring that they have a solid core. Open Source programmers also tend to program with themselves as an intended audience, rather than the general public. Lastly, there is a widely known stubbornness by Open Source programmers in refusing to learn from what lessons proprietary software has to offer. If Open Source software wishes to become widely used and embraced by the general public, all five of these issues will have to be overcome.

Contents

Introduction [slashdot.org]
User interface design [slashdot.org]
Documentation [slashdot.org]
Feature-centric development [slashdot.org]
Programming for the self [slashdot.org]
Religious blindness [slashdot.org]
Concluding remarks [slashdot.org]

Introduction

Its my Open Source project and Ill code what I want to.

Over the past few months, Ive found myself charged with the task of taking an existing Open Source project (to avoid pointing fingers, lets just call it Project X) and customizing it for academic use. Though I wont claim to be an expert in the realm of all Open Source software programming trends, I have a lot of exposure to it: I consistently try to use Open Source technology whenever possible (I fully support the sociology behind the movement), Ive been a major player in a few small Open Source projects still in development, and I now have the experience of a few months of working on Project X. So despite not being an expert, I believe my opinion can stand as a relatively well-informed one.

I have five major complaints about Open Source [1 [slashdot.org]] software development, but in advance I would like to clarify two things. First of all, there will always be exceptions to every rule. For example, I believe that relatively few complaints listed here apply to the Open Source browser Firefox [2 [slashdot.org]] which continues to surpass my expectations. Im discussing general trends that Ive noticed, not specific cases. Secondly, I dont think that these are unresolvable problems. The purpose of this document is to raise awareness -- not to mindlessly complain -- in hopes that the Open Source community may begin to change their mind-set about some of these issues and work towards improving them.

That being said, Ive found the five most important flaws with Open Source software development to be as follows:

1. User interface design [slashdot.org]
2. Documentation [slashdot.org]
3. Feature-centric development [slashdot.org]
4. Programming for the self [slashdot.org]
5. Religious blindness [slashdot.org]

User interface design

Project X comes with a neat interactive calendar. Just as youd expect, you can schedule events, share events with others, and resolve conflicts. However no one will ever know about it, because in order to see the calendar module, you have to know the URL of the module in advance: there are no links to it, aside from one that's buried several pages deep. Project Xs user interface is a nightmare. There are

Move along, nothing to see here

[mahdi13]

1. User interface design
2. Documentation
3. Feature-centric development
4. Programming for the self
5. Religious blindness

Same argument, different 'paper'
1. Improving and is nearly a non-issue these days
2. Documentation is more plentiful then most 'closed source' groups. If having less 'Dummy' books means less documentation, it's a negative I can live with
3. Doesn't MS Office count as a Feature-centric project? You can really put MSOffice in place of 'ProjectX' and it would sound the same
4. Sounds like a crappy project to me if the developers know of the problems but don't fix them.
5. There are lots of egotistical elitests, but I've noticed in the wild that there are less now then a couple years ago. If you punch everyone in the face and they all leave, don't be suprised when there is no one left to punch.

Overall it sounds like this guy had a bad experiance with A single project and decided to generalize it with all Open Source. I'd be nice to know what ProjectX is, then we all can get on them over it.

The Notes section seems to get the highlight of the paper.

Availability, Installation

[swagr]

Availability.
Most people simply don't know that GIMP and OppenOffice exist. Or that they can be installed on Windows fairly easily.

Installation.
Some open-source developers just assume that you'll have a compiler handy, and will want to adjust the Makefile to point to the right libraries (which you'll have to compile and install yourself...).

Mirror from original author here

[Anonymous Coward]

here [insanecats.com]

Re:The webserver shoulda been running apache...

[kclittle]

Writer of grandparent is probably a Left-coaster; in California, "guy" is a gender-neutral pronoun...

msdn

[Koyaanisqatsi]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]

Seriously. All the documentation you could ask for, and then more.

Re:Move along, nothing to see here

[CrayzyJ]

Thank you or making the Religious blindness case for the author.

> Documentation is more plentiful then most 'closed source' groups

This is a load of bull crap. Apparently, you have been a Linux user for a while. When I first started out (last year), I spent hours on newsgroups trying to solve my problems. For that matter, I'm searching NGs right now to find out why my RH upgrade borked. Closed-sourced SW has books, manuals, and ultimately some one you can ask for a fee. This is not the case when you hit some obscure RPM bug.

>Doesn't MS Office count as a Feature-centric project?

nope. It's UI-centric.

> Sounds like a crappy project to me if the developers know of the problems but don't fix them.

_THAT_ is the authors point exactly.

> There are lots of egotistical elitests, but I've noticed in the wild that there are less now then a couple years ago.

I see it the other way around. Go to newbie sites and see how often they are beat down.

>Overall it sounds like this guy had a bad experiance with A single project and decided to generalize it with all Open Source.

Gal, not guy. Note MANY of us struggle daily with OSS. I still cannot get my network printers working properly with CUPs. I have missing RPMs I can't find for some apps. I already mentioned my RH upgrade issue. I won't even get into RPM dependencies. Honestly, I think a real problem is that OSS advocates are good with the products, and they are not feeling the pain from those of use trying to get on board. Dude, it's frustrating. Trust me. I'm there. When I read articles like this, I feel the author's pain.

Re:Is she high?

[jdray]

I have to say that I'm still a little confused. If the author is referring to Open Source Software, but not Free Software (as you stated, a subset), and not packages that vendors have released as Open Source, it seems to me that they've handily reduced the scope of their statement while keeping the moniker of Open Source Software so they can bash on it.

"...buy me an acre of land,
between the salt water and the sea strand."

Re:Good points, not just OS specific

[bandannarama]

The reason they're OSS-specific is because commercial software developers can and do provide incentives and motivation (in the form of paychecks) to do the boring stuff. They (we) in turn can do that because they're being paid by their customers to do so.

I disagree with your implication that the problem is symmetrical. While it is true that anyone can pick out a few counterexamples, the truth is that in commercial software, products with poor UI/documentation/boring stuff begin to suffer as soon as a more usable alternative shows up (sometimes even when it has fewer/weaker features). There is no such built-in forced-evolution environment in OSS -- the software is usable enough for the people who have the power to do anything about it, and that's the end of the matter.

As an example, take what happened with Word and WordPerfect back in the early mid 90's. No, Word did not demolish WordPerfect solely on the basis of Microsoft's considerable marketing prowess, although that was certainly involved. Rather, WordPerfect had a dominant market position, almost a monopoly, but they dragged their feet developing a GUI (Windows 3.1) version of the product after Microsoft released Word 1.0. I don't recall how long it took WordPerfect to come out with a GUI version, but I remember a) thinking it took a long time, and b) Word garnering high marks in the press for its slick (at the time) interface even though it got dinged for having fewer features. Microsoft kept cranking, and released Office. Even back then they made a point of having some semblance of commonality in the menu structure and hotkeys across the applications in the suite. When WordPerfect eventually released their own GUI suite, the reviews in the press were distinctly critical of the differing menus and hotkeys across the apps.

These things matter. If OSS does not find a way to address them, OSS developers will continue to fight an uphill battle. It's still a fightable battle, of course: Eventually the cost of the extra training corporations must invest in order to use OSS will become smaller than the price they pay for commercial software. Microsoft Office is not cheap...