For various reasons I am staying out of government politics these days but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stay away from a bit of controversy when it comes to my beloved Open Source crowd.
I remember at one Boston Summit, being held at the MIT Stata Center, where Luis Villa, our much appreciated lawyer in training (or is he an actual lawyer yet and more importantly can we start cracking lawyer jokes?), was holding a Marketing BOF. In this BOF we ended up listing things that GNOME didn’t do well in which someone who was not part of the GNOME community but rather an invited guest took the session to mean that GNOME was in serious trouble and was folding in on itself.
What this person failed to realize is that self introspection and acknowledging ones weaknesses is the first step to becoming stronger. In our case it was the first steps to becoming a stronger community.
It is with this in mind that I read Henri Bergius’ great synopsis on the Apple MagicMouse vs the Open Office mouse design. It illustrates one of Open Source’s short comings with mitigating complexity. To stereotype us collectively a bit, we are like Sheldon from the show the Big Bang Theory. Sheldon can solve complex theoretical physics questions in his sleep but ask him to engage in simple social interaction and he hides behind condescension and excuses the interaction as unimportant.
Similarly, ask us to solve a complex computer problem and we will do it but ask us to make it easy to use, something the masses would go out and spend money on, and the same indignant statement seems to permeate every discussion about it – “that’s not something I would want to use”. Ok, so the analogy isn’t fair because as a group we are as diverse as any other but from the amazing things that we have produced it is clear that collectively we have a hard time hiding the complexity of it all. For some reason Apple is able to promote ease of use and they get praised for it but when we try to promote it we hit a wall of cynicism – “You’ll have to pry my user interface from my cold dead hands!”
So the question is will we ever learn how to mitigate complexity or will we just leave that for others to add as a competitive advantage? Is our end goal to just be a building block of modern technology or will we be the finished product itself? I don’t have that answer but I do know it is something we need to introspect on. We need to ask ourselves these hard questions, not as acknowledgement of failure but as acknowledgement of the fact that we can always do better by honestly and without cynicism, examine our weakest points. As other parts of the industry learn from our successes in development and internally implement changes based off of the Open Source model, we too need to look at their successes in the mass market and see what we learn from them.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
I remain unconvinced that the Open Office Mouse doesn’t just represent a grand practical joke.
Comment by Anonymous — November 9, 2009 @ 2:06 am
I’m pretty sure the mouse is just a joke, but that people would take it seriously says tons about OOo.
(And I’m not quite yet a lawyer; bar exam results in less than two weeks and then have to get sworn in, etc.)
Comment by Luis — November 9, 2009 @ 2:28 am
We do not solve the hard problems. “Perfection is not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing to take away.” And most Open Source hackers never think about taking away, especially not taking away as much as possible.
Which also ties into another problem that OSS projects run into more often than not: Taking away stuff later is way harder to sell to your users than not adding it in the first place. There is a lot of things that almost noone needs and that confuse people (my current pet peeve: menu accelerators and mnemonics in general), but if you wanna remove them, there’ll be a HUGE flamefest. So it’s better to not add them in the first place – but who does that?
Comment by Benjamin Otte — November 9, 2009 @ 4:49 am
IMO you’re feeling too pessimistic about this… First, many open-source developers these days (esp. from the Gnome/Fedora/Ubuntu corner) are quite good at removing unnecessary complexity; and second, many users are appreciative of this. It’s just that the complexity-lovers are more vocal
and cry if devs disable Alt-Ctrl-Backspace or similar stuff.
Personally I’m excited about gnome-shell and Zeitgeist, exactly because I hope it gives us a simplified UI for dealing with files and applications. Having Nautilus and bash available for “raw file system access” is still important, but having Zeitgeist etc. offer a different, user-centric view is a huge step forward. And I think many users will appreciate this, even if they will not praise loudly.
Comment by oliver — November 9, 2009 @ 6:12 am
There is a *huge* debate inside the OOo community about that mouse… it was proposed as an “incubator” project and it was misleadingly presented as official. Now the people in charge issue delimitations, showing is not official.
Comment by nicu — November 9, 2009 @ 6:25 am
The problem here is that people put all the FLOSS community on the same bag, which is nonsense. The user interface paradigm on GNOME and the user interface paradigm on KDE are vey different from one another. OpenOffice.org, KOffice and Abiword are different beasts, also.
The community is not single-minded and that is the main point that everyone should realize.
Imagine if we said that the “closed / proprietary software community” doesn’t know how to build good interfaces because some shareware app was designed by a monkey. It’s a stupid thing to say. Yet, people use this kind of reasoning when talking about FLOSS.
Comment by Henrique Rodrigues — November 9, 2009 @ 7:08 am
So Luis’ sentiment hits the nail on the head here. The fact that people would take the OO.org mouse seriously is the perception we have to deal with. Like it or not, Linux inside gets lumped with complexity inside. Mitigating complexity is also about managing perception of that complexity.
Look at Microsoft. Windows 7 is probably marginally better than Vista. I don’t doubt they have improved it but it probably still suffers from much of the problems that plagued previous Windows versions. They have however been largely able to get people excited over the release because hey, at least it isn’t as bad a Vista. By managing the perception they are able to mostly navigate their own mistakes and come out unscathed on the other side. Apple is taking out ads to hammer home the previous perceptions.
To that effect Google is trying the same thing with Droid. Their first few iterations of the G Phone have mostly been met with meh so now they are trying to correct the perception of a maker of clunky ugly phones with a sleek new advertising campaign aimed at Apple’s iPhone shortcomings. We will see if they can deliver.
Comment by J5 — November 9, 2009 @ 10:24 am
I like the idea of having about three modes of UI; beginner, intermediate, advanced. Progressively more options are exposed as higher modes are selected.
Comment by anonymouse — November 9, 2009 @ 11:10 am
The three option system was discussed years ago around the GNOME 2.0 timeframe. It sounds like a good idea but in practice means you are creating three different code paths, two of which are inevitably going to suffer as the developer starts running into the complexities of maintaining such diverging UIs. It is much better to keep core functionality in libraries and have different set of developers develop different applications based on their core audience. We see this approach with the OLPC, Maemo and Moblin. Hiding complexity is not the same as mitigating it. Again, look at Apple. They don’t come out and say lets make an iPod interface for novices, intermediates and power users. They simply say, lets design a kick ass music player that everyone can use.
Comment by J5 — November 9, 2009 @ 2:54 pm
While the community is diverse, it is true that the average Free program is way too complex to actually use. It is, however, clear that some of you GNOME guys are working hard on changing this. For this, I thank you; it is greatly appreciated.
Comment by Søren Hauberg — November 9, 2009 @ 4:15 pm