{"id":1413,"date":"2004-04-05T11:29:22","date_gmt":"2004-04-05T15:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/04\/05\/open-source-conflict\/"},"modified":"2004-04-05T11:29:22","modified_gmt":"2004-04-05T15:29:22","slug":"open-source-conflict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/04\/05\/open-source-conflict\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source conflict"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

This is probably below the radar for lots of you, but there’s a good
\nlittle discussion going on in the open source software world about user
\ninterface and usability.  In regular people’s words, how easy does
\nthe software make it for the user to do what s\/he wants?  Can the
\nuser figure out with ease how to get from A to C?<\/p>\n

Eric Raymond, one of the high priests of open source, an expert of experts, couldn’t figure out how to use his own printer<\/span><\/a>.  John Gruber, of Daring Fireball<\/a>, notes<\/p>\n

Raymond is ignoring the actual depth of the
\nproblem. It’s easy to say, The open source community needs to do
\nbetter, we need to create software Aunt Tillie can use.<\/em>[emph. in original] But they’re so far
\naway from this right now that even an expert like Eric Raymond can’t
\nfigure out how to use their software.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The “I thought I was the only one” letters that Raymond found so
\ninteresting aren’t coming from the A.T.-set; they’re coming from Linux
\ngeeks who read essays written by Eric Raymond. And they’re frustrated by
\nopen source software’s terrible usability. The problem isn’t just that
\ndear old A.T. can’t use desktop Linux — the problem is that even Linux
\ngeeks have trouble figuring it out.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another perspective comes from mpt<\/a>, on “why free software usability tends to suck.”\n<\/p>\n

So why do I care?  Well, because the statistical software that I
\nuse is open source (as per the trend at Harvard to push the open-source
\nsoftware over commercially available alternatives with user interface
\nthat make is easier for the novice to get up and running with his or
\nher data analysis), and its user interface sucks.  Yes, it’s very
\npowerful; yes, it’s customizable; yes, it has more flexibility than a
\nnumber of the commercial products, especially when you get to the
\nadvanced level and need to program your own models.  But that’s
\nnot very likely in the sort of research that most of us in political
\nscience do.  The existing models are quite adequate, especially in
\nlight of the fact that when one deals with social phenomena, you can
\nget very precise, but probably not very accurate.<\/p>\n

But everyone here wants to see us use R<\/a> (a variant of the S<\/a> language),
\nrather than Stata<\/a> or SPSS<\/a>, or even SAS<\/a>. 
\nSo we’re all being turned
\ninto open sourcers, whether we want to or not.  But the problem
\ncomes when you decide, “Oh, I want to run X type of analysis.” 
\nYou know the statistics that you want to do, but the damn interface
\ngets in the way of doing that without some significant programming, on
\na steep learning curved.  It
\ntakes quite a while to figure out how to get that analysis loaded, how
\nto run it, and how to get some results to come back to you.  Much
\nmore
\ntime than I remember it taking with the commercial software projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is probably below the radar for lots of you, but there’s a good little discussion going on in the open source software world about user interface and usability.  In regular people’s words, how easy does the software make it for the user to do what s\/he wants?  Can the user figure out with ease […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ontheweb"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-mN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}