I Like Open Source but Just for Infrastructure

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I really like using open source components for enabling technologies.

The first part of that statement is incredibly obvious. Open source software is generally free, usually functional (provided you can get it to work), and probably has a pretty good feature set/extension library.

WordPress is a great example of a piece of open source software I absolutely love. And one of the reasons WordPress is great is that while they’ve built a great core, they let people make their own user interfaces and extensions.

However, when open source projects have to be usable by people other than contributors, bad things happen. It rapidly becomes “Dancing BearWare,” where the bear doesn’t dance very well, but at least it’s dancing at all. Read more about it in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper. Alan talks about software designed not for users but programmers, which is the source of the problem. (This entire book will be addressed in a future post.)

While not all open-source stuff is user un-friendly (WordPress, for instance), a lot is. And because a picture is worth a thousand words, I will close this post with a picture of mouse designed for OpenOffice.

Update: I am not the only person that thinks this. Today I watched a video on wordpress.tv of Matt Mullenwagg (founder of WordPress) talking about this. He calls it the “bike shed color” problem. (It’s at 12:30 in the video. He explains it better than I can.) He also compares OpenOffice’s options panel to a tax form, which I’m inclined to agree with. (That’s how it spawned the mouse at the bottom of the article.)