A rant on the user-friendliness of open source software (OSS) and web standards (via memetank). It’s not just a rant, it does also have a helpful suggestion at the end, i.e. a charitable foundation to pay people to write proper, usable, documentation. I’m inclined to agree with a lot of it - OSS, especially the software used for servers and scripting, can be a bastard to configure, and the documentation (if it exists) can be appallingly hard to read and navigate (yes, I’m talking about you, MySQL).

But things may be brighter on the client side, as we see the rise of elegantly designed software like Firefox (though Thunderbird still has some catching up to do, I have issues with it and its stupid ‘one To: and Cc: line per recipient’ rule when composing mail). OSS that actually gets used by everyone - desktop GUIs, web browsers, email and IM clients - is starting to rapidly improve as OSS coders realise that their projects need users to be successful. Also, I think the sexiness of OS X may have something to do with it, as it shook up the stagnant, Windows-dominated state of UI design, and showed the world that Unix-based software could look quite good. As more enthusiastic design-minded people get on the OSS bandwagon, the state of client software design can only improve. Which is great for the average end user, but it will still leave us (by us, I mean programmers who want to get configuration done & out of the way so we can get some work done) having to configure complex applications like Apache or Sendmail (shudder) in the dark.