waffle

Computer Sweden interviewed Eric S. Raymond yesterday about the past and future of open source and how it relates to the Free Software wing. If you know Swedish, it’s a good read.

However, one thing stuck out at the end. I’ll translate this passage:

Q: Open source is often criticised for not being user friendly. Why is that?

A: That’s correct, we have issues with being user friendly. We’re improving, but there’s still a way to go. An explanation is that many come from a Unix background where the prevalent culture is a programmer culture that doesn’t pay attention to usability. Another reason is that programmers have a tendency to write for their own needs instead of their customers’. Sooner or later, usability will become more prevalent, but it is hard to predict when.

So, in those lines, Eric establishes that:

• Programmers, by and large, don’t pay attention to usability.
• Programmers are happy using non user-friendly interfaces - usability only comes in when the customer expects it.
• Good usability can creep into products as more hands touch the code; unless Eric figures that everything will have to be replaced, Eric implicitly hints that this is the way it’ll happen.

I feel I should object to this. There are many people who care about usability. I care a great deal about usability, even in toy apps I write for myself. There are many programmers, fortunately, with a knack for usability. So I think Eric should have gone out of his way to clearly delimit any programmer culture from the specific original Unix programmer culture, where usability is taking a hit in favor of, of many things, componentization and the strong passion for the command line. There are clearly many programmer cultures, including the programmer cultures in, for example, Gnome and Mac OS X where usability takes the front seat, in Gnome especially where it clashes with the pre-existing Unix culture in a number of places; witness the spatial Nautilus, for example.

But that’s not even the important point. The important point is that Eric to some extent sees usability as something the customer demands, not that something that’s an intrinsic part of a great product. John Gruber famously argued that usability is really something you have to take into account right from the start. It can be retrofit, but as the program approaches an application rather than a backend architecture, the difficulty of this really goes through the roof. So it is a technical problem.

But more than the technical aspect, the curious position is that hardened programmers don’t need no usability. Instead of “let’s respect the people who will be using this and make it easy and efficient to use so that we can get out of their hair and let them get real work done”, there’s buried a sentiment that the customer (or user) is stupid; we have to dumb it down for them. I wish Desktop Linux the best, I really do, and Ubuntu in particular has made enormous strides in the past few years. But with sentiments so deeply buried in community members that continue to make a difference, is it any wonder many people think it’ll never work out?

Update: Many of the points are indeed extrapolated from the thinking behind Eric’s comments. It may be true that Eric does not carry these sentiments personally right now, and just expressed himself badly; I don’t think it’s likely, since Eric has no trouble expressing himself in general, but as with any interview it could happen. It is however certain that Eric’s thoughs have lied in this general direction before, and so I don’t deem it unlikely that this is more or less how he feels about these issues today.