I constantly use open source AND commercial applications and operating systems and I really agree with you.

So, I wonder why open source projects are so good in giving services for programmers but don’t have services for a good usability testing team. It is a matter of technical difficulties, money or what ?

And the alternative you are proposing is… programmers have to bow at the table of their users?

This sentence pre-supposes a falsehood, that users are somehow obligated to use Free Software. You don’t directly say it, but you seem to be claiming that programmers need to be obligated to their users, which aren’t paying them or in any other way in a position of authority.

The free software relationship is one of freedom in both directions. If you prefer, there are no obligations, unless the user and programmer freely enter into them.

This is no different than commercial software, after all. Most people would laugh at the claim that Microsoft should create features and software for people that aren’t their customers. (With a small exception for security fixes and that only because it ultimately affects their paying customers and everybody else to boot.)

But somehow, programmers freely giving away their source code seems to disconnect people from this simple relationship.

They are free to ignore you. You are free to use something else. They are free to suffer whatever consequences result from your non-usage, which I suspect you’ve rather over-estimated. Should you find that open sourec software doesn’t meet your needs you are simply right back where you started, not behind by anything but evaluation time.

To make it really clear, since I’ve actually been around this loop before: If you really want to question this point, then you need to explain to me how my working for free and freely giving something away that I could have simply *not* given away somehow obligates me to you. I’m yet to hear a coherent explanation of this. I think it’s because one doesn’t exist.

Sharecroppers, serfs, and…

Slave (n): Someone who works for 0/hour through duress or duplicity; eg an open-source programmer.

Isn’t it deplorable that so many people chose to be serfs? There is nothing that prevents them
to learn. There are many easy languages, Ruby, Tcl/Tk, Python. There are many books, a lot of free information, a lot of interpreters/libraries, example code.

All in all I prefer CLI tools. I find them more efficient and easier to use which is why I consider them more user friendly. I feel akward using GUI:s and thus I can spin it around and say that the Windows, Mandrake or OSX environments and installers are very user unfriendly. Posted by peter@fsc.cc on Thursday, February 17th, 2005 at 6:58 AM You have it backwards… I find the Debian installers to be very user friendly, especially since you can just open a console on the other TTY’s. What opening the console has to do with anything? I also find GNU Bash more user friendly than the Explorer in Windows. I find GNU Emacs more user friendly than Eclipse and MS Word for editing code and writing documents. I also find mutt more user friendly than Outlook or Thunderbird.

Then you just don’t know what friendliness is. You don’t find Gnu Bash more “user friendly”, you merely find it more useful to you. It is a completely different thing. Same for Emacs, Mutt etc. Have you done SCIENTIFIC research on HCI (Human Computer Interaction), with a group using say Emacs and another one using Word? In real scientific tests on users CLI programs as you mention fair much lower than GUI programs. I can understand that people do not have the time to learn Bash and/or Emacs, but they find them difficult to use based on lack of knowledge, not because Bash and Emacs lack functionality. Who said anything about lack of functionality? Unfriendly != lack of functionality. Something needing more knowledge than something else to be used means that the former is LESS USER FRIENDLY. So, when you say that: “I can understand that people do not have the time to learn Bash and/or Emacs, but they find them difficult to use based on lack of knowledge” you essentialy say that Bash and/or Emacs are not friendly. Friendly means precisely REQUIRING LESS knowledge. It’s time to start addressing the real issue: who is the intended user group? People with the skills or people without them? I don’t see why skilled power users shouldn’t be able to use CLI tools and ignorant/non-caring users can use the pictures and WYSIWYG’s. In fact (1): Debian Installer and Mutt are not CLI tools. Debian Installer and Mutt are ncurses tools, which is a GUI toolkit. The fact that they run inside a terminal does not make them command line programs. So you are mistaken if you think that CLI tools are better because of …Mutt and the Debian Installer. Emacs too has a curses interface (and another toolkit). The mere fact that you press keystrokes doesn’t mean anything. Most GUI programs can be controlled by keyboard shortcuts.

Fact (2): As much as GUI tools have flaws (such as the Debian Installer), CLI tools have the same flaws too. For example inconsistency. The -h flag means “show help” in some CLI programs, but it means for example “show in megabytes and kilobytes” in LS. Some CLI programs adopt one configuration format (say XML), some adopt another, having the user to remember endless meaningless variations of specific mini languages. Etc. All in all I prefer CLI tools. I find them more efficient and easier to use which is why I consider them more user friendly. I feel akward using GUIs and thus I can spin it around and say that the Windows, Mandrake or OS X environments and installers are very user unfriendly. But you would be wrong, since, as I already showed, you cannot even distinguish between a CLI and a GUI program.

Even though I see no difference between purchased and Open Source software as far as adding additional functionality, I am an advocate of Open Source software. It’s cheaper to purchase and in many cases fixes are made available much faster than for purchased software. Harold is right, though, when he says that Open Source projects should spend more effort on producing good user interfaces. Getting the user interface is very, very difficult, but very, very important!

And while a mechanic can pretty much fix any car, how many programmers know all languages on all platforms/architectures on all the OS’s out there? Seems like the only ones you can take advantage of this is big corporations and programmers, such as myself. Freedom my ass.

An element missing from Human-Computer Interface Design (posted in your Recommended Reading) that goes to the heart of all software usability is Feature only what you need to. Why is Microsoft Works so successful? Because it offers a very large user-base — home and small business — just the right feature set for their needs. At $49 at his or her local Staples it is an extraordinary good return on investment. What you see coming from most free and open software developers in the integrated application arena are attempts at something with the richness and complexity of Microsoft Office. A usable application suite is hard to achieve even with the resources that Microsoft can bring to the problem. But what really haunts the free and open software developer is that when working on something smaller — an RSS reader or an IM client — the developer tends to make it bigger by adding far too many non-core features and configuration options to integrate non-core features with core features. Having more features is a sign of prowess. Having better access to features is not. If we could make usability visible — alluring even — we would have better usability.