Quick aside: you appear to have a very interesting UTF-8-encoded "From" name
string:
From: =?UTF-8?B?In46Jycg44GC44KK44GM44Go44GG44GU44GW44GE44G+44GX44Gf?=
=?UTF-8?B?44CCIg==?= <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
... which actually expands to (what appear to be) a number of interesting
chinese glyphs! This may not be what you intended..
~:'' ありがとうございました。 wrote:
> the unfortunate fact is that open source is not above or beyond this
> type of controversy.
>
> ie who funds the developers?
> who are they developing for?
Actually, at least in major open-source projects such as the Linux kernel,
nobody cares. In such projects, you will often have many developers paid and
working for the interests of various companies.
Not only is this not a bad thing, however, it's actually very good as it results
in a larger number of (presumably effective) developers working on developing
the code-base full-time.
The open-source development process is, at its core, evolutionary. Each
developer works to build new revisions of a given project. If the new version
is 'fitter' than the original, then those changes will be adopted. If the new
version is inferior, it won't.
In such a system, the more competent developers you have, the better. It
doesn't matter that they're all trying to apply evolution pressures in different
directions; the project as a whole will still benefit.
> in many cases developers:
> have little or no understanding of a 'public' audience.
> actively refrain from user testing.
These two points can be summarised as "open-source developers don't care about
usability." And this demonstrably isn't true.
Different tools are designed for different audiences; emacs, for example, is
intended to be usable by developers - and it is. Similarly, Ubuntu, GNOME and
other systems that _are_ intended for regular end-users have clearly seen a
great deal of usability testing.
> encourage feature creep
Do you have any evidence that you can port to to demonstrate this?
> design to impress their peers
You say this as if this is a bad thing!
> in some sense consumerism at least gives the end user some authority.
To a degree, but it heavily depends on there being a free market with a number
of competing alternatives.
I'm not an economist, but it appears that, in computing, free markets generally
cannot form if the interfaces used for data interchange are closed and/or
proprietary; in such markets, one provider will eventually tend to dominate all
of the others.
For example:
Operating systems: MS Windows tends to dominate (because nothing else
can run
Windows applications, as the ABIs/APIs are myriad and not fully documented);
Office productivity suites: MS Office tends to dominate (because
nothing else
can read/write the proprietary file formats that Office uses.)
To contrast:
Web browsers: There are many web-browsers: Seamonkey, Firefox, Internet
Explorer, Safari, Konqueror, Galeon, Lynx etc. (because the interfaces that
such applications must support are well-documented.)
Web servers: lighttpd, Apache, Nginx, IIS etc. (because the interfaces
that
such servers must support are well-documented.)
.. and so forth. If there is a free market, then the consumer has influence.
Note that in the case of the BBC iPlayer and other similar services from other
broadcasters, the interfaces are not fully documented - and this is considered a
feature!
> as you may know, the web specifications created by W3C are far more
> potent than the mere iplayer.
I don't think I understand - how (and why?) are you comparing the W3C interface
specifications and guidelines, which exist to ensure interoperability between
different implementations, and the BBC's iPlayer, which is just one application?
> The issues are similar though there are
> more companies and corporations engaged in the project
Than which project? The W3C? There have certainly been many more companies and
corporations involved in the W3C specification development process than that of
the iPlayer!
Cheers,
David
--
David McBride <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London
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