LinuxCon: Some advice from Uncle Dirk

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0201835959/ch01lev1sec1

Roughly, though, it's "avoiding the three-click problem": it's not always easy for some coders to get up out of the nap of the earth to 5000 feet, much less 30,000 feet, and make sure that they've actually completely specified the problem ... which is what is being complained about there.

FOSS development works, most of the time, we are told, without any direct financial incentive because the developers are scratching their itch.

The problem on point is that *they're not scratching everyone's itch*.

Figuring out how -- and how far -- to generalize, and then making sure that all happens, is the job of systems analysts and project managers. In my personal experience, the number of people who are really good at both is small. I'm a competent coder, but I don't *love* it. What I *love* is figuring out what people really need, and then specifying that so that someone can create it.

FOSS development caters to people who are good to great -- or at least *dedicated* -- coders, whether or not they're good designers (I've seen some really raunchy programs in FOSS; great code, but they're just not up to the task, as demonstrated by the opinions of their audiences)...

but it -- and by "it", I mean "lots of the people who run big FOSS projects" :-) -- doesn't tend to deal well at all with people who are really good analysts/designers, but aren't coding superstars.

Or, perhaps, my entire opinion here is colored by the unsurprising fact that they just don't agree with *my* view of The Way Things Ought To Be; unsurprising because I, clearly, don't agree with theirs. :-)

This is all my perception, of course, going back to when I could read all of Usenet in a day; it's leavened by 25 years in DP/IT, most of it as a designer/analyst, much of it writing my own code, and also by interacting with quite a number of FOSS projects to varying degrees of depth, including big modern things like WebGUI and Zimbra, and old projects like HylaFAX. I could be wrong. :-)

"usable and workmanlike looking" is the part I was suggesting is supplied by designer/analyst types, and often missing in FOSS projects, because it's not "essential to the base function".

A current example that's driving me insane is Knetworkmanager, as supplied with SuSE 11.0, which I run on my laptop. The Right Way to handle this stuff has been pretty obvious for some time -- supplied, embarassingly enough, by Windows XP... though it often can't keep the links *running* to save its life.

But KNM makes me jump though some non-obvious hoops to get anything done, having to know that I must choose "New Connection" in order to teach it about a network I've never been on before, and having to suffer through a popup menu that completely fills the screen of already learned networks when *none of them are in range*... and which is *in the way* of the other menu as I scroll up to do the thing I actually need to do.

That's the sort of three-click-problem items he was talking about, IMO.

And the simple fact of the matter is that while I could probably contribute to fixing them, the amount of time I have available to deal with the 30 or 40 such things that make it difficult for me to use SuSE/KDE3 on a daily basis limited to "I might hang a ticket, if I don't have to fight to find and sign up for your tracker". And what I *get*, in a lot of cases is "we look forward to your patch".

I've *read* "Smart Questions".

I submit that while I understand -- and even approve of -- the arguments it makes, *that's the difference we're talking about*. If you want Real People to *want* to use your stuff, then *someone* has to deal with those issues.