Open Source User-Friendliness in the News

Posted on 13 Jan 2009 3:20 UTC

With Ubuntu, the devotees believe, things might finally be different.
“I think Ubuntu has captured people’s imaginations around the Linux desktop,” said Chris DiBona, the program manager for open-source software at Google. “If there is a hope for the Linux desktop, it would be them.”

Well, we’ve heard that one before: Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, Corel, Java Desktop Environment, ... All promised to make a user-friendly desktop-ready Linux, and nobody has succeeded yet. Why should that be? There are lots of reasons, but ultimately it’s simply that the average open source developer has no care or clue about what users want. They develop code “to scratch their own itch”, and are unapologetic about the fact that it may not meet some other user community’s need. After all, they’re not being paid.

Or perhaps it’s because Linux kernel developers are openly hostile to the idea of creating a working system? Or perhaps it’s because open source developers would rather achieve a state of perfect ideological purity rather than help users deploy safe software?

Thankfully, Mark Shuttleworth is taking it upon himself to pay for a bit of usability testing, and Ubuntu is available in lots of languages. I’ll be even more impressed when they stop lying to their users about the system’s security. (In the past, such “denial of service” issues have turned out to be exploitable. The default assumption of developers should be to assume that such a suspicious-looking bug is exploitable, treat it as such, and fix it. Security researchers should not have to weaponize every single bug to get action from developers — at this point, as engineers, we know enough to err on the side of safety. And that includes being honest to users about the risks they face.)

“If we’re successful, we would fundamentally change the operating system market,” Mr. Shuttleworth said during a break at the gathering, the Ubuntu Developer Summit. “Microsoft would need to adapt, and I don.t think that would be unhealthy.”

I wonder what it is Microsoft would have to adapt to? They’ve already got an internationalized OS that undergoes significant usability testing (not enough, though) and has an organizational commitment to secure software. It’s not free-as-in-speech, but it’s accessible to normal humans.

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