On Sunday 04 April 2004 00:34, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On 2004.04.03 16:07, IanBell wrote:
I have a great personal dislike of articles like this. Instead of bleating, the writer should have had a constructive dialogue with the authors of CUPS. Try doing that with Windows!
Of course it is easier to criticise than to do.
There is another issue though which is that his comments don't just apply to CUPS but to much other free and open source software and maybe he is hoping that, by writing the article, more than one of these projects will take his comments on board.
I do seriously wonder though whether the people with the techical knowlege to write a piece of software can ever put themselves in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about the task that piece of software is intended to do.
In general they can't. That's why software should always be put in the hands of naive users - and the lessons learned - before releasing it on an unsuspecting public. It's depressing when an employer tells me he expects the programmer to do all his own debugging and user testing.
But on the wider comment raised in the article, some time in the early '90s I saw a piece comparing operating systems with office furniture. Take a teak desk, it said. Scratch the surface of a Windows desk and you find chipboard underneath. A Macintosh desk on the other hand is teak all the way to the middle. Under the Linux GUI now is - well certainly not chipboard, but defintiely not teak either. Microsoft have gone some way to catch up with Apple, but Linux GUIs are much younger and have further to go. The Open-Source Horror Story deserves an airing but only as a lesson that we shouldn't be complacent about our claimed superiority; there are plenty who won't see it that way. I like the K desktop; I want to use it and I want it to be at least as good as Windows on all counts. It's already better on many but there are some glaring holes, configuration being an area particularly deserving of a lot more attention.
-- GT