No that's very much the point, because what happens is that the experts tweak it for their own benefit and entertainment.
Unlike a physical craft, where the typical piece of hand made furniture is not much different from the piece of hand made furniture turned out by the typical home workshop hobbyist ... in Open Source programming, all of the most widely used open source programs are very much atypical ... because there is a very strong power law distribution, and the typical program produced is a far cry from the programs most commonly used.
Sometimes they're even condescending and dismissive of users who aren't part of the community of experts who understand how to compile and edit the software for their own use.
For the desktop ready applications described in this diary, this matters no more than the attitude that Microsoft programmers have at work ... the Open Source community of the most commonly used applications is quite different from this, which is a typical Open Source community, and includes a substantial number of contributers that specifically contribute to ease of use. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
There's no peer to peer network at present that can on its own cope with the usability testing demands of the Open Source toolkits at the level of complexity of OpenOffice or Chrome. On the other hand, there is Sun and Google, looking to leverage Open Source contributions by making those toolkits Open Source. A need for corporate contributions to user testing of large scale applications would be a hurdle if there were not the corporations with an incentive to make those contributions. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
