Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, and How to Improve It

For some reason, OSS seems to attract the “feature” crowd who seem to think if one feature or function is good, then 5,343 of them are better. This leads to things like the PHP language, with seemingly a billion functions served (and counting).

And for every group that does pay attention to design (like Firefox), it seems like there’s fifty or more who don’t, or who think that “design” can be solved by coming up with yet another way for a user to “skin” a program.

We often point to Apple as a company with great design, but what most people miss is that Apple’s design aesthetic is largely based on editing. Or quite simply, it’s based just as much on what to leave OUT as what to include.

And leaving things out, to a feature-counting function junky, is anathema.

Finally, the OSS community is just that, a community, composed of individuals, each of whom has his or her own likes, dislikes, and sense of design and style (or not).

Without editing and without a strong guiding hand (which OSS developers disdain), every program is bound to have it’s own identity, style (or lack thereof), word choice, and set of behaviors.

OSS is, and probably always will be, a cacophony of design.