Stop Microsoft
All Things Microsoft => Microsoft as a Company => Topic started by: skyman8081 on 10 September 2005, 21:24
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This is a formal, peer reviewed, study of the usability of open source software. (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_1/nichols/)
Sometime, you have to face reality. And it will hit you like a dead fish at 3:00 in the morning when you are trying to sleep.
Some people here are operating on the assumpion that open source software, by virtue of it being open source, is inherently perfect. This is obviously not possible.
I'm sorry to say, the usability of open source software sucks balls.
Proprietary software is not inhenently better, but in my own personal experience, proprietary software tends to be of a higher quality than its closest open source counterpart. And in my experience, usability of a program plays a large part in it.
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Usability is one area I always noticed that alot of free software developers were never the best at.
There is the OpenUsability (http://openusability.org/) project (among others) to try and remedy the situation.
(Note: I didn't even read the article. I don't need to.)
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Why come to us with such complaints? I doubt many of us actually make such software. What are we supposed to do?
Or said a different way...ok, now, how do I help? Is there a way, without me needing to program (which I can't)?
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However most of the users of these applications are relatively technically sophisticated and the average desktop user is using standard commercial proprietary software...
This sorta sounds like it is saying that smart computer people use OSS/FS, and dumb non-computer people use proprietary software. Ceteris parabis, anyone who has used a computer for a reasonable amount of time and is capable of absorbing knowledge, should "graduate" from (for example) Windows to Linux.
Also, Skyman, you should have noticed that there were many occasions in the article in which the authors made claims like "open source developers prefer power/functionality to usability". Like WMD's analysis of your comparison of iTunes and xmms, we see two completely different ideas of what constitutes a good program.
And if you think about it for a second, the definition of usability is only a real issue for amatuers. Once you have been banging on a program for awhile, usability is no longer your concern. At that point, power becomes more important. My opinion is that using "usable" programs can cripple your ability to learn powerful software with an "unusable" interface; similarly, if you take a while longer to figure out the powerful stuff, you can master the easy stuff quickly.
Finally, I would like to head off any potential arguments by saying that the authors did not truly address the question of whether it is even possible to have power and usability in the same program. On can argue that Photoshop is more usable and more powerful than gimp. But the gimp has only been in development for a year or two, while Photoshop has been around for much longer - the proprietary foundations of Photoshop were patented by John Warnock back in the 70s (based on stuff he developed at Xerox-PARC). In reality, one cannot even compare gimp and Photoshop for neither power nor usability. So the whole argument is moot anyway.
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I find gimp more usable than photoshop and you can compare them. I just did.
If you want a functional product to be released as soon as possible you ditch the gui and get it working. Windows programs have to have a gui so that people will sell it.
Linux would never have proceeded as fast as it has if every application had to be released with a gui.