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rasat

Forum Fellow

From: Finland, working in Romania

Registered: 2002-12-27

Posts: 2,294

Website

Open-source developers and their attitudes toward users and usability

Here is an interesting interview Thomas Baumgart (dev of KMyMoney) gave to Dave Yeats of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX via ICQ who is working on a dissertation about open source projects.

Dave:
One thing I noticed from my analysis is that there seems to be a real distinction between what I call "normal" users and developer-users (or "source-aware" users). What, do you think, are the essential differences between typical computer users and source-aware users as they relate to the open-source community?
http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/interview1.html

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Markku

wuischke

Member

From: Suisse Romande

Registered: 2007-01-06

Posts: 630

Re: Open-source developers and their attitudes toward users and usability

Indeed an interesting read.

It's similar for aMule development and I can relate to much what he said (although I had some "*ouch*, that's a point where we are lacking" moments while reading).

Source-aware users can help a lot by discovering the source of bugs and writing patches. But just as Thomas Baumgart said, given a certain level of understandment, you can explain the proceedings to a user and they are a big help, too.
Let me quote a fellow developer after he explained the recompilation with all available debug symbols to a user:

Wow! It's been ages since I last saw such a beautiful aMule generated stack trace!

Of course, there are many other ways people contribute to aMule without writing a single line of code (building distribution packages, translating the application, contributing artwork, helping other users in the forums, discuss topics in a constructive way, writing/translating wiki pages,...) and all this aids the development as well.

But then there are other users, who are little fun to work with. When you work on something voluntarily in your free time, the last thing you want is to hear demands, unconstructive critic and the complaints of people who refuse to read anything.

peets

Member

From: Montreal

Registered: 2007-01-11

Posts: 936

Website

Re: Open-source developers and their attitudes toward users and usability

Maybe the non-source-aware users can be further split up into two categories: those who know and care that the project is open-source, and those who don't. I have a feeling the first kind will be more helpful, understanding and happy users. I wonder what the proportions are.

wuischke

Member

From: Suisse Romande

Registered: 2007-01-06

Posts: 630

Re: Open-source developers and their attitudes toward users and usability

That's an interesting point and I think my experience confirms this.

I don't mean no offence, but there are some Mac users who have little experience with the inner working of their system and little interest in doing some relatively simple steps like starting an application from a terminal to see the output. I think they expect their system to work and don't have to experience little problems as often as users of other operating systems. (For instance almost every long-term Windows user knows about the taskmanager to kill an application and I guess most users of Linux learned how to solve some small problems.)
Most Linux/*nix users on the other hand have at least some basic experience with a cli and compilation and post a lot more backtraces.