On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, James Edward John Taylor wrote:
Brief Summary: I dont believe Open Source software has to be userfriendly. I feel **VERY** strongly that the programmer has the right to be "free" in their programming and make non-user friendly interfaces IF THEY SO WISH, and that the dicussion over "they SHOULD" make userfriendly or "people should" is at basically wrong, because they are getting a free ride out of the software
I quite agree that no-one should try and oblige volunteer developers to write anything they don't want to. However, it's rather unfair to describe non-developers as partaking of a "free ride." There are well-documented (for example, in _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_) examples of their contributions like writing formal documentation, and well-crafted bug reports. I can think of two less well-documented, but more widespread examples:
Some of the best documentation Google can find is the informal kind, in the form of end-user questions, and corresponding answers, in mailing list archives. I'm sure even "real hackers" make significant use of this resource.
Everyone who goes to the trouble of installing a Linux distro increases the incentive for hardware manufacturers to open up their drivers, or at least their specifications. That makes life easier and more comfortable for all of us.