Linux will fall flat on its face – report
A CANADIAN researcher has warned that Open Source will fall flat on its face unless it gets its act together.
In First Monday, Michelle Levesque said that the Open Source concept fails because of its "user-interface design, documentation, feature-centric development, programming for the self and religious blindness".
She warned that Open Source will remain an unknown quantity to most computer users until these problems were addressed.
Levesque, a researcher for the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies in Canada, said there was a lack of intuition in user interfaces, probably because geeks gave more weight to integrity rather than beauty.
She added that the geeks thought they systems they were designed were intuitive enough for them and that user interface design wasn't real work. Which made it impossible to be popular with regular users who needed an intuitive interface.
"What the user will see - and what they'll judge the project based on - is the user interface. If it's inadequate, no one outside of other geeks will touch the program," she wrote.
She added that open source projects had a big problem with documentation - "if they provide any documentation at all." She blames this on a lack of contractual responsibility.
