Article Find: Fundamental issues with open source software development

[mouser]

You may not agree with all of it, but it's an interesting read by someone trying to give helpful advice to the open source community.

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 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:
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http://www.firstmond...s/issue9_4/levesque/

found by db90h

[mouser]

the article is from a published monthly online journal called First Monday:

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has published 708 papers in 122 issues; these papers were written by 840 different authors. First Monday is indexed in Communication Abstracts, Computer & Communications Security Abstracts, DoIS, eGranary Digital Library, INSPEC, ISI’s Web of Knowledge, Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts, LISA, PAIS, and other services.
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more history: http://www.firstmonday.org/idea.html

some recent issues:

[housetier]

as much as I hate to disagree but here I do so

I don't think this is a "great" article. To me it seems to take the worst of the worst and define it as "fundamental".

I totally agree that there ARE issues. Absolutely. And each project has its unique issues which can be grouped together for easier comprehension.

But now lets take the same approach on people. Every single person on this planet is better with certain things and worse with others. Now we group the worse things together. Say we have six five groups now: input (seeing & hearing, senses in general); output (languages, lisping, bad teeth, mimic); effeciency (non-sprinter types, parkinson patients); interoperability (cultural background, language barrier); look&feel (ethnicity, dress-code).

Now I declare the human being is fundamentally flawed. (Yes others will agree with me on the result, but that would be a philosophical issue not a systematical).

I am not saying that the article is bad, but in my opinion it is too short to be "fundamental". The result might be correct but don't agree with the way we arrived at this result.

(I should have taken debate lessons while I was in South Carolina, then I wouldn't lack all the terms I was looking for. I can't quite express it nicely what I was trying to say.)