Image via WikipediaSlashdot had a post up about an essay by Matthew Paul Thomas. You can read it here.
Its point is that while the open source model of software development is able to achieve good code quality by opening up all sources & letting others fix and build on your previous work, the model breaks when it comes to software usability.
A programmer may want to scratch their own itch, and not care so much about presentation and interaction with the program, whereas someone experienced in usability design may lack the necessary coding skills to just take the source and “patch the user interaction”.
In academic software, this is only worse… here, scratching your own itch is the main motivation, and documentation, maintainability and usability more often than not are so way down on the list that they’ll be done “right after I’m through with graduation”, which is never.
Some of these points are also discussed in this article, which goes back to a rant from Eric S. Raymond himself.
