Walt Mossberg today made a really good point, that I entirely agree with. He write and often views things from a consumer perspective on technology. Not the uber-geek position, not the kernel hacker, not the sysadmin position, not the CTO position… from the “real user” position that makes decisions about what they will buy.
The point he made was, asides from Firefox… what open source software is actually “there” for the consumer. He pointed out that the only other piece of open source software that had really infiltrated the homes of consumers and became the de-facto solution was the Tivo (which I did not know prior had any open source code in it).
Linux? It’s got less marketshare than Apple, and Apple isn’t at the breakpoint yet even for being “mainstream” for many people. It’s great for servers, not so for consumers. Open Office/NeoOffice? Microsoft Office really is much more slick and works better in pretty much all ways.
Open Source has too many problems. I’m not going to point them all out, but there’s two really simple ones that are rather obvious. The first being that the monetary motivation to develop the product often isn’t there. 90% of Open Source developers are probably 1 man teams in their bedrooms hacking on code on the side. Obviously there’s some things like Zope which are far different, but for the most part even with them… the same motivation isn’t there as there is for Microsoft.
Secondly (and this isn’t talked about enough). I’d say (and have no facts to back this up asides from my own experience) that 98% of people who are working on Open Source Software are software programmers. What’s wrong with that you ask? Who needs the marketing team? Who needs those business guys? Who needs those graphic designers? Umm. The software often does. Mainly on the side of lacking good UI designers I can see that the programmers just don’t get it. They think in code, not in user interface and design. They don’t think about if their mom can use it. They think about “well there’s this commandline interface that works great for setting additional options”. I’m serious. We need some of the arts community to get into OSS hard and heavy. Most of it looks honestly like shit. Look at the average piece of OSS and then look at an Apple product. Case in point.
Firefox rocks. Some software is becoming open source like Second Life, and that’s good, but it didn’t start out that way.
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sudonim