For a little while now I’ve wondered why the label “Open Source” seems to mean that whatever the label has been applied to is fantastic, beautiful, and somehow better than everything else in the world evar. To me this seems a little backward, at best. So far I’ve found very few great open source desktop applications. Its not like there aren’t thousands, it just seems like most of them just aren’t up to par with their commercial counterparts, and, even if they are their interface is so damn awful that no one knows how to use it!

Interface
It seems one of the biggest problems open source software has is lack of good taste when it comes to interface. Often times open source applications are either unbelievably ugly and alien or so complicated that you need a manual to find out how to select something.
Its not that the open applications are inherently low quality or unstable, its just painfully obvious that the people who wrote the code, also designed the interface. Not all people who know how to write code are terrible at interface design, it just seems to be a fairly common trend. A somewhat notable exception to the rule seems to be growl, which is in fact open source and really even the ugliest themes for it are tolerable. ‘Though it does help they’ve had [semi-]professional designers, design things for them.

The backside
Although most open source software (OSS) seems to have absolutely no desire to actually have a nice polished interface, OSS does have a saving grace: Libraries. If there’s one thing the open source community is good at, its producing fairly quality libraries. The reason is fairly simple: The people who are actively involved in the OSS community are ultimately massive geeks and programmers. They know how to write good code and assuming the open project in question doesn’t have an interface, you can bet its going to be of some level of quality.
Another thing thats good about OSS is that it produces open, common standards that tend to carry across platforms, and projects. A good example of this is ogg vorbis which is a lovely open lossy audio format. Ogg Vorbis is now fairly widely supported and is really a rather nice format.

End.
I suppose the point I was trying to get across with this fairly crappy blog post was that open source desktop applications are usually of low quality in comparison to applications that have been at least partially commercially backed. Of course this is not always true, and its always nice to see an exception. In addition to that the OSS community seems to be quite prolific at producing both libraries and standards en-masse. Certainly not all libraries and standards are solid gold, but a notable amount are.

Until my next attempt to write a blog post, byebye.