Daniel Hardy

Jeff Atwood recently wrote a great article about how he gave a small open source project $5000 with no strings attached.  To his surprise 4 months later the money hadn’t been touched.  To me this is a great example of how open source is often about the love and not about the money.

The comments section was of course filled with numerous suggestions of how the developers should have spent the money.  One theme that stood out to me was to spend the money on hiring a graphic designer to come in and update the look of their site or perhaps a marketing firm to help them get the word out.

This really resonated with me as I have been contemplating why so few designers donate their time and energy to free products.  It is intriguing that so many great developers are willing to give up their free time to create amazing products while there appears to be a dramatic shortage of designers, marketers, technical writing, and other “support”(for lack of better term) personnel willing to donate their time.

Is it because only developers are using the products?  This certainly isn’t the case considering some of the greatest applications out there are open source.  Perhaps instead it is because the products these professionals are currently using are not opens source.

Perhaps more important than dwelling on why there is a shortage we should be looking for a solution.  I have on many occasions made comments to friends and colleagues about perhaps supporting an open source product by creating a comp, or giving them usability advice.

With that in mind I am guilty of not contributing as much as I should.  Most of my digital exsitence is now dependent on open source products and as of late I have not been contributing.

I recently got an iPhone and in true geek fashion I have been excitedly showing some of its fun features to anyone that will listen.  The one feature that seems to get a lot of reaction from people is the AppStore.  People love how you can simply select something and next thing you know it is installed and ready to go.  No download and unzip, no double click the icon, no restarting, no fuss.

None of them realize that there is an entire operating system that generally functions the same way albeit a lot less flashy.  The package managers in most modern Linux distributions work on the exact same principals.  Simply select an application you wish to install and it will take care of the rest.  Some distributions go even farther and have a bit friendlier interface to their repository such as Ubuntu’s Add/Remove programs.

Perhaps Ubuntu should take a few ques from Apple on this and improve the experience a bit more.  First of all the naming convention is boring and could easily be confused with the traditional Windows area which no one used.  Second they should provide screen shots of the applications. Generally before I install an application I want to know what the interface looks like.  Finally they should try and integrate some social capabilities.  This would allow users to read reviews from other users who may be like them.

These few changes could greatly improve the experience of adding applications.  It could also become a major “selling” point of the OS.

I have returned safely from my first trip to the east coast/south.  It was a trip filled with firsts; first time I have been to the east coast, first time I have ridden on a subway (it didn’t go so well), first time to experience a vastly different culture in my own country, first time seeing a true “uptown”, first time I have used navigation to save a life.

All in all the trip was amazing.  There was a bit of everything and as usual I didn’t take enough pictures.  To check out those that I did take view my flickr map or if you preferr you can just view the regular flickr.