Linux-Hater’s Blog, Considered

“And then there’s this: You don’t pay me, so I don’t care what
you want. LHB is right; a lot of open source is developed by
developers for developers and underweights – or completely fails to
connect with – the needs of actual users. In fact, the situation is
actually worse than LHB describes; his belief that “When
you’re small, you’ll do a bunch of stuff to try to get more
users.” is, generally, false. Small open-source projects
aren’t normally focused on getting more users at all; usually, they
happen because some hacker thought a particular program would be
fun or useful to write, and whatever number of users show up in his
in-box is fine with him.

“It’s no bad thing to have LHB remind us that inattention to
end-users’ needs is a serious problem; it’s a point I’ve made in
public more than once myself. Nor is he wrong to point out that
formal project management can’t actually solve this; the developers
themselves have to care. I actually like his last line: “And
besides, open source projects already have product management. It’s
called a bug tracker.” Spoken in jest or snarkiness, perhaps, but
they really do function that way.

“So, is there a solution? Interestingly, LHB is too smart to
actually commit himself to the position that monetary incentives
can make developers care; one suspects he’s been a programmer
at a closed-source shop, and knows exactly how often the whole
self-congratulatory apparat of paid managers and marketing
departments produces botches just as awful, if not worse, than
development-by-geeks-for-geeks.”

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