[Sigia-l] Marketing vs. design

[Alexander Johannesen]

On 11/20/05, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> The fundamental problem for retail-level open source software is NOT one of
> marketing and cute packaging, for heaven's sake. They suffer from piss-poor
> design.

Hmm, there are thousands of open-source projects about, so careful
about that broad brush of yours.

I'd like to remind you that there are lots of *really* well designed
open-source software out there, albeit not so many in the general
consumer area. Eclipse, for example, is really well designed, but used
only by geeks and developers, and so, invisible to Average Joe, and
the same with things like Tomcat, Linux (kernel), eXist DB and a host
of server-side text-based tools of various kind coined at the loveable
geek. On a more visual level, the Firefox browser certainly isn't
piss-poorly designed, neither is Open Office 2.0, in as much as they
were designed for being vague duplicates of legacy applications.

You're right that the design of FOSS for most type of applications
that have a commercial counter-point generally suck and is poorly
designed, being that most of them comes from the "itch to scratch"
departement, but you know ... you can always join a project of your
liking and help out. Personally, I think the biggest problem of the
whole shebang is that people who design well isn't nescessarily
interested in open-source stuff, but that's just my own broad sweeping
and wrong brush speaking.


Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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