Sometime Today, NM cobbled together some glyphs to say:
- "We see open source as a software development method"
He undoubtedly has still not opened his eyes to the revolution
it is in fact a development method. release often, release early is the development procedure. many eyeballs making bug shallow is bug finding procedure.
- "We compete with OSS products"
He continued to mention red hat, ibm and oracle. THey don't realise that the
people will not use something that does not appear to have a company behind it. it does not matter how free it is. Winamp was built, marketed and sold by one guy, but he put a company behind it, which made it successful. The larger the app, the larger the apparent size of the company needs to be.
- "OSS is at its peak"
I thought we are still at the foot of the mountain (or a plateau since we never go down) while microsoft is finished climbing and now going down
I doubt anyone can finish climbing. What OSS is probably way ahead in terms of stability, performance and efficiency, but guess what? those things don't matter to users. Users are willing to put up with one crash a week as long as their window borders have a drop shadow. What OSS lacks is good User Experience Designers. UEDs don't generally care about FOSS.
Companies like Microsoft and Apple are way ahead of the curve here. They've been running usability labs for decades. They know what users want, and they put more of their resources in there. They know that when the user clicks the close button on a window, that button should appear to get depressed. They know that a certain item should be the first item on any menu, and a certain other item should always be the third. They know when to put ... in a menu, and when to put pictures.
Gnome and KDE are getting there, but there is no one, anywhere, who is bothered with sitting down and going through every button, every menu item, every click, every keypress on these systems to say what is wrong. There are users who do this kind of stuff, but then you have developers who say - hey we'll fix the usability issues later, let's make it stable first. Which brings us back to the difference in priorities between users and devs.
Philip