Jakob Nielson on OSS usability:
From a usability standpoint how do you rate open source software compared to proprietary software?Poorly, I�m sorry to say. I think the reason is that it�s biased highly for one specialised area which is the very technical such as IT systems administrators. But Linux for the average user or other open source solutions for someone who is not a geek rates particularly low.
The reason is, the motivation for open source is not because the person gets paid but the person gets prestige. The developers are designing for each other and they are so feature rich--geeks love features--and you get more prestige by adding features. For the average person fewer features is better and easier to understand.
The value systems are kind of opposite for what average users need and what open source developers want to do. As long as they are designing for other people like themselves it works quite well. But as soon as they try and design for the average person it breaks down....
Open source software, in my experience, does suffer from this problem. Firefox is the exception says Michelle Levesque, who has closely studied this problem.
I have five major complaints about Open Source software development, but in advance I would like to clarify two things. First of all, there will always be exceptions to every rule. For example, I believe that relatively few complaints listed here apply to the Open Source browser Firefox which continues to surpass my expectations.
Creating and shipping great user-oriented software is no simple task. You've got to have solid planning, strong leadership, capable engineers, lots and lots of testing, and most important of all, an understanding of the customer. I think that last bit is the hardest for most OSS projects that try to appeal to more than just open source techie types.
Firefox is doing things differently and has been since it's inception. The project began with a small team of talented engineers who put usability above breadth of functionality and who began by saying that just because a feature was free, doesn't mean it necessarily belongs in the product.
