Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
So I was complaining like a week or so ago about FLOSS software not being good - about treating the needs of normal people as though they were secondary and unimportant, and developing exclusively for a narrow group of purists. And I definitely think this happens! Which of course raises the follow up question: What does it take to avoid this sort of thing?
Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
First off, I think it's going to take a lot more work. Which, given that FLOSS software is already struggling to cover the existing maintenance work, is something of a real problem. In order to solve this, I think two things are going to be necessary - both dramatically increasing the amount of work that gets done, *and* increasing it's effectiveness.
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@Angle I feel that there is a frequently-overlooked option that doesn't necessarily increase work, but only *feels* like it does: developers interacting more directly with users, and providing non-judgmental assistance.
Very often developers take an attitude along the lines of "I don't want to have to deal with users, that's somebody elses job", or if they *do* provide support, it's often in a very patronizing way that scares people away and obscures a lot of the details of the problems that they run into.
I feel that if developers learn to change their attitude on this, and provide end-user support from the perspective of "if someone has a question, that must mean there is a problem with the UX or the documentation somewhere", that could meaningfully improve things.
This *seems* like it's demanding extra work from developers, but in practice I've found that it mainly helps to catch problems early and keep them from spiralling into problems *at scale* - by doing a bit more work upfront, it prevents a lot of confusion, miscommunication, remediation work, redesigns etc. down the line, and the end result is that in the long term it *reduces* the total workload.
The biggest hurdle here, I think, is actually convincing developers to change their attitude in these matters, because that "don't want to deal with people" tends to run pretty deep. The flipside is that this is a change that can be made today, in existing projects, without any extra organizational complexity or costs.
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@joepie91 Also, there's an argument for specialization of labor here too - having dedicated FLOSS orgs for supporting users of various software. Obviously lots of questions about appropriate implementation, but worthwhile in the long run, I think.
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@Angle I think there's value to dedicated support groups, but I also think that it solves a different problem (capacity) than what I was describing (awareness of common user experience).
Probably both should exist in a sufficiently large project, though you can get by without dedicated support folks for a surprisingly long time, especially if you otherwise have your community management in order, as there are usually volunteers who take on that work unprompted 🙂
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@Angle I think that's a good idea. I've written a couple of things to that effect, and so have others, but I don't think there's anything really comprehensive in the right tone yet, at least not that I've seen.
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@joepie91 Having actually been on the 'dev supporting users' side of things once or twice, I would also like to see users learn to do things better on their side. Like, learning to be polite, to check the FAQ first, etc, etc.
Actually, here's a thought. Some kind of protocol guide for user/dev interactions? So user know how to approach devs and devs know how to approach users.