John Gruber complains about the Open Source development model and its supposed failures. I disagree heartily, but before I insult his conclusion, I need to point out that he’s chosen a terrible analogy as well:
The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. Imagine a motion picture produced like a large open source project. Different scenes written and directed by different people, spread across the world. Editing decisions forged by group consensus on mailing lists. The result would be unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable.
Imagine a motion picture produced like a motion picture. That’s exactly how they’re done, dumbass. And while in my opinion most of Hollywood’s output is, in fact, unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable, they do seem to be quite successful. The other conclusions of the article are about as insightful: Eric Raymond and many other programmers are egotistical (shocking!), user interface is difficult and underappreciated by programmers (this hasn’t been drilled into everyone’s head yet?) and open source projects are sometimes less organized than closed ones.
I want to point out the “sometimes” here: as far as I can tell, a corporation isn’t going to have much more organizational control than any other group of a few hundred people. Things are done by consensus with the benevolent dictatorship of the maintainer, or, in a company, by the manager. If people don’t like it, they can stuff it– which is called forking, transferring to another department, or quitting, depending on your context.
Finally, the argument that open development projects will by nature lack good UI is the same as the one I used to hear that they will always lack good docs. Nobody claims that anymore because docs nerds like me came out of the woodwork and started writing docs. Good UI is becoming important, and recognized, and is appearing in more and more apps, because designers are coming out of the woodwork and helping out. This is especially true of GNOME, thanks to the work of several dedicated programmers, the GNOME foundation, and corporate backers like (ahem) the Novell Ximian Group, Siemens, Red Hat, and Sun.
Maybe it’s not done yet. But there are a lot of “full-time, well-paid” people working on this software too, and we’re doing it with a lot of part-time, unpaid folks who are chipping in for the greater glory.
Near wild heaven has several good GNOME UI examples, with classy-looking screenshots too. In other words, our UI brings all the boys to the yard. Damn right it’s better than yours.
Secretly Ironic 