Usability Ballet
If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I am easily irritated by false arguments. Today, I ran into this one: Freedom to Run Means Freedom from Complexity. The gist of the argument is that free, open-source software isn’t really free if it’s difficult to use—because the technically unskilled can’t figure it out, they’re not free to use it.
This reasoning is patently ridiculous. One’s freedoms are not bound to one’s abilities. There are many things I am able to do, but which I am not free to do, and conversely there are many things I am free to do, but which I am not able to do. I am able to drive my car at one hundred miles per hour, but I am not free to do so—I’m likely to be arrested. On the other hand, I am certainly free to dance ballet, but I am not able to do so.
Applied to software this means that the GNU Compiler Collection, for example, is open-source, even though most people will never find it simple to use. The grant of license does not include a guarantee of ease of use. This is the same license used on a large portion of popular open-source software, some of which is easy to use and some of which is not.
Our freedom to use open-source software does not bind its developers to make it easy for us to do so.
May 2nd, 2006 at 6:49 pm
If people want easy, they have another freedom – The freedom to buy a different product (in this case, a Mac).
Nobody is saying anyone must use OSS software exclusively, and part of the tradeoff for Freedom (capitol F) is the entry costs of training.
Mac OS X is what comes of taking the F out of one part of the overall product, namely the GUI… It’s arguably less flexible than X (no network transparancy, etc) and it’s definitely not OSS, but it’s really really easy to use. But you still have the freedom to get under the hood, install X and all the other command line bits that are arguably unfriendly, and do real work.
Also worth noting: Ease of use is a subjective thought. A person raised on a command line may find a GUI terribly unintuitive, and one who has lived in Emacs will be dissapointed by having to go to menus for 90% of the functionality of Word or OO.Org.
May 2nd, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Upon further reading of the article:
This is just a whiny windows user trying to defend why they aren’t selling their soul for not taking the OS plunge. Note the above freedom of purchase. If one is complaining that drivers aren’t available for a given device for Linux, you can always buy a different device. And if enough people pass by a device because they don’t write drivers for a given OS, the manufacturer will eventually learn that demand is shaping their business (At least in a non-monopolized Free Market economy).
One could argue just as much that the exclusive driver contracts that MS has with various device and software developers is limiting the ease of OSS adoption, and doing so in a way that no ammount of development time will fix, and that buy using Windows with “free” programs only prolongs the overarching problem.