I had an ephinany a moment ago about open source software and why it has challenges with broad uptake. Simplicity. People make open source software because they believe in it and because they want to. Almost by definition, these are the technological "have"s. They focus on things like security, reliability, functionality, all of which are necessary, and are things that many commercial programs lack. The problem is, these products tend to be built by the technically competent who have a hard time relating to the technically challenged mass market. They tend to be more powerful, but also more complex and therefore harder to use. Case in point... VLC is awesome, it plays every media format known to human kind and has tons of features I don't come close to understanding. WMP on the other hand is buggy and limited, and often a headache, but it is simpler. For example, lets say I click on a link on a webpage and a video opens. I like this video and I want to save a copy of it on my computer. In WMP I click File -> Save as, give it a name and I'm done. In VLC, well, I'm not actually sure how to do it. I just tried to figure it out for the sake of this post and failed. This issue isn't specific to VLC, but to many FOSS programs. They are designed by geeks and, to some extent, for geeks without adequate consideration of the non-geeks. If FOSS is going to really become a mainstream contender then it needs to be usable by mainstream users, meaning those who are still looking for the "any" key.
I agree and have made comments to this effect before with regards to *nix operating systems, through some are a lot better in regards to user friendliness on the desktop than they've been in the past.
Yup. Also, many (not all) OpenSource projects goes in the wrong direction, and start comparing itself with paid software with number of option instead of usefulness. So you end up with useless options, like to change the title bar text, and not actual important feature which lacks. Or some project simply don't move (OpenOffice). It looks the same since version 1 and still lack of important and what is considered today basic features: grammar check, let a lone a good spell check system. Open Office great idea, used to be great, looks like no more effort is put into it anymore. And as you said... OpenOffice is hard to use.
i wholly agree, i'm in the midst of trying to install a *nix os on an embedded device to take over as my modem/router. it has been the most esoteric frustrating experience in my life. i'm on day 3, more inexplicable nonsensical errors than i have ever seen. i love errors like 0x857d failure in line 23. but i've accomplished a lot so far, like my first pxe install, getting grub configured properly so the device boots without being connected to a serial terminal, and navigating and configuring a lot of the system over the serial cli interface, now i'm just left with trying to get the pci adsl card to be recognized and active, so far i've only been able to get it to come up as a listed piece of hardware in lspci. fun times.
That's because, as Cthippo rightly said, the people developing FOSS are doing it because they wish to create something that they need. They are not doing it to sell to others (in the majority of cases anyway) and so ease of use comes second to feature-packed. There is also a difference between 'easy to use' and 'quick and simple'. The beauty of FOSS is that if you think a program lacks a certain feature you'd like it to have then you're usually welcome to make it yourself. The devs aren't doing this for your benefit.
