Gianluca Turconi wrote:
What I have read in Mr. Brown's article is an attempt to demolish open source "assumptions" (as he wrote) with other personal assumptions.
What I read in Mr. Brown's article was a recognition that the open-source development model championed by Eric S. Raymonds in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" simply doesn't apply to a project like OOo.
It applied brilliantly to the development of the Linux kernel and the GNU tools and utilities comprising the GNU/Linux operating system. And it applied to flagship projects like Sendmail, Fetchmail, and Apache.
But the fact is that ESR's model assumed that the users of a program were the same folks that would be hammering at the code swatting bugs and adding features.
When you enter the space of end-user programs like OOo, those assumptions don't hold anymore, so the vaunted advantages of open-source development may not obtain. At the very least you need to find a model that works in those circumstances. I don't think that's quite been nailed yet.
I would go so far as to say that one of the main problems with projects like OOo is that you have programmers designing the program. Of course they will be the ones coding it in any case, but anyone who can understand and use, much less actually like, a tool like Emacs has no business designing the UI of a mass-consumption program. They just have the wrong mindset. Hence, the design of the Options dialog (and the Preferences dialog in Mozilla for that matter).
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