Here's a quote from the piece:
Many hackers assume that whatever Microsoft or Apple do is good design, when this is frequently not the case. In imitating the designs of these companies, volunteer projects repeat their mistakes, and ensure that they can never have a better design than the proprietary alternatives.
and a hypothesis:
The usability of most software sucks. I don't see anything unique in the free software world in this regard. While it's true that few open source software projects seem to have many usability experts on the team, how many commercial software projects do?
In fact, as an area of specialization, user interface design and the like are quite new in the software world.
There are certainly serious usability issues with the OpenACS 4.5 toolkit, but not for the reasons mentioned in the article. After all, we're still at the "port to PG without breaking Oracle, productize and deliver what we've inherited" phase of the project. The people who produced the code were paid by aD to do so. If the same people had written the code to be released by aD under proprietary license would they have done anything differently? I don't see why we should think that.
Note that I'm not trying to belittle aD folk (the ACS 4 toolkit was released prematurely IMO and given more time, the aD folk would've produced a much more complete product, regardless of license). Nor am I trying to minimize the usability issue. It's a serious one. I just don't believe the premise of the article, which is that open source software sucks in usability in comparison to proprietary software.
It's ironic to see such an article written by a Mozilla contributor, since I find Mozilla, with its tabbed browsing and pop-up turnoff features, more pleasurable to use that IE these dayes.
And this past weekend I had the pleasure of setting up GNUCash 1.6 for the first time. In an afternoon I figured out how to set up my consulting business records, including tax reports that can be imported into Turbo Tax. I find it's UI to be quite intuitive and straightforward.
On the other hand, if you've ever tried using the GIS program Grass you'll probably believe the premise that free software flunks the usability test :)
Unfortunately parts of the OpenACS 4.5 UI, especially in the admin portions, sucks and there's absolutely no doubt that we have to improve it. I haven't heard anyone disagree with that yet!
