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Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> The weird thing in my opinion: why is open source software such a pain to use? They don't have commercial interests?

My guess is its a combination of 1) lack of resources and 2) being developed for the developers themselves (who are weird users).

Most of the best open source software (e.g. Linux) is that way because commercial interests have incentive to pour some of their vast resources into it (and if copyright was ever abolished, expect it to start sucking, because the main reason we get to seee the commercially-funded improvements is the genius of the GPL).

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All of that, and more broadly because FOSS developers are horrible about accepting advice or feedback from non-engineers, like designers or "normie" users. (Naturally speaking in broad terms, here; I'm sure some are great.) I can think of three or four (otherwise excellent projects) I've used where a "please put that CLI-only utility everyone uses all the time into the GUI" PR or Issue gets repeatedly closed. Or where making the rudimentary GUI look just a bit nicer would attract an order of magnitude more users. I think some developers really don't want to make things for non-developers. I get that, to a certain extent - support gets way, way harder, for instance - but then there really isn't much ground for complaining about FOSS's limited reach.

You're certainly right about 1), but why 2) needs to be the end of things, I don't know.

Clearly, open source software with a good interface becomes more popular. I suspect, being popular isn't really a good experience for the developer, who then gets inundated with unreasonable requests etc.

Why bother abolishing something that is obsolete?

Even the GPL isn't needed anymore when you can trivially reverse engineer nearly anything.

2 often translates practically to "designed by a committee", which surprise: isn't always very good or usable.

Probably true, but why do they have to organize themselves in such amateurish ways? There is nothing stopping open source developers on a project from organizing themselves in a professional, effective manner?

When they put their individual egos above the actual outcome of their efforts, well, that's a programmed disaster of course.

I mean, I don't think they have to or anything. I imagine what is stopping them is more inertia, how they've traditionally organized themselves, and so on. It's the same thing IMO that prevents big companies from building products that find clients down market. Claiming you want to do it, and having an organization which _can_ do it are different things.

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