One of the deep dark secrets open source folk never like to mention: open source is made by techies, for techies. In that light, it's clear why the end-user adoption rate (for Linux on the desktop, for example) is so low:
People don't hate Linux, but the community's arrogance[...]-- APT vs RPM: The Comment That Flooded My Inbox
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. It's one of the reasons that we strive to make the Bricolage UI as intuitive as possible. Yes, planning and administration is a lot of work, but any competent IT department can get it up and working for its users just as well as it can set up an Exchange server. In both cases, the principal user is someone who doesn't have to worry about the details -- just getting her work done.
Re:I somewhat disagree
ziggy on 2002-08-27T14:49:59
The arrogance isn't universal. There are lots of open source projects that by design have very limited audiences of very capable people. Things like Boost come to mind. The arrogance is more of an issue with open source projects that aim to serve a more pedestrian audience (end users).Look at it this way: companies like Apple pay decent numbers of people to study and push the envelope in usability and human factors in software. Yet even Apple drops the ball every so often; lots of their online help and printed documentation is lacking, and their intuitive interfaces aren't intuitive for many people (at least the first time). Yet on the open source side there are plenty of people (both coders and "advocates") that sing the praises of Linux, Gnome, KDE, and so on, refusing to see that their beloved projects are doing a poor job in communicating to the end user.
Re:I somewhat disagree
pudge on 2002-08-27T14:56:53
But in this case, the Apple arrogance is even worse; they think, often incorrectly, that they are doing a great job for the end user, and they actually take money, and give little support back.
