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On Thursday 08 January 2004 13:18, Keith Abraham wrote:
I know it's only "Microsoft Jack" but I think the following deserves a knowledgeable reply. http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1117835,00.html
Draft for my contribution to a reply. It is not obvious to {me} that usability testing cannot be done with Open Source software (initial inspection shows such a suggestion to be false), nor that the reuslts of usability testing cannot be fed back into improvements in the interface. It is also, if one follows the writings of Jakob Nielsen of www.alertbox.com fame, clear that closed source software still suffers from a dearth of usability testing and improvement. It is correct to identify this area as a challenge for the Open Source community, and, given that all previous challenges have been met with serial success, it is reasonable to anticipate advances in it. Innovation --------------- Most of programming and development effort, regardless of where it is done, falls into two large areas of work:- - Mundane: on the one hand there is the routine solving of well-understood problems in similar, identical, or slightly different circumstances to those in whcih they have been solved before. Closed source development has, for instance, solved some of the the problems of local government IT support in such a way as to give "Approximately 16,000 justice and public safety-related data elements were collected from various local and state government sources. These were analyzed and reduced to around 2,000 unique data elements that were then incorporated into about 300 data objects or reusable components" (Adelman: http://consultingtimes.com/osgov.html ) - Particular: on the other there is the solving of a problem specific to a time and palce, a company or project, using what is to hand. THis may involve inventing something new or achieving an insight, but this comes from the exact circumstances, and clearly is not made less likely by the source code's being visible elsewhere. Of the remainder, some is speculative, some academic. Contrary to the assertion in the article, in the field of medical records software and medical ontology, the innovative projects are more likely to be Open Source (eg OpenGalen at Manchester University, Open-EHR in Australia). Each is very specifically engaged in developing "an independent software architecture" to support doing well things that are impossible or done badly at present. -- Dr Adrian Midgley I use Free software because it is better http://www.defoam.net/ They carefully didn't ask. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.