> What a disappointment... The world is black and white, Free software > is doomed and male free software developers are the vermin of society, > asocial and weird ... Hmm, why should I take the rest of the article > serious?</sarcasm>
I agree with your disappointment, Frank. However, my disappointment -- and irritation -- stems from the utter inaccuracy of the following passage: "For example, a core element of geek culture is a focus on 'hard' technical issues, such as operating system internals and network stacks, with a corresponding scorn for 'human' issues, such as usability and user interface design. When people (male and female) who care about usability attempt to contribute to FLOSS projects, they're often ignored, jeered at or told, 'What do you mean, it's ugly? I can use it!' The result? Linux desktops like KDE/Gnome, which no one but a propellerhead could love." This is patently wrong. While I do not have the requisite knowledge to feel comfortable discussing on KDE and usability issues, as a researcher who has formal training in human-computer interaction, and who uses GNOME every day, I would, however, like to counter Michelle and Greg's assertions regarding usability and GNOME. Usability has been a core concern of the GNOME project for many years. This is evidenced by the existence of the GNOME Usability Project (GUP; http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/), whose lucid article "Why GNOME Hackers Should Care about Usability" emphasises that software development should be driven by users and usability, while explicating that usability is not about dumbing software down, nor is it about piling on features or simply making software aesthetically pleasing; rather usability is concerned with making software easy to use for everyone -- novices and advanced users alike. In addition to general articles on usability, the GNOME Usability Project have also produced the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG; http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/), a document written for software developers, interface designers, and graphic artists involved in creating software for the GNOME environment. The HIG is a comprehensive document, covering many aspects of HCI, usability, and interface design, including prototyping, user testing, requirements analysis, and desktop integration, as well as more mundane (though no less important) topics such as design simplicity, and menu and toolbar layout. I would encourage anyone who doubts GNOME's committment to usability to at least skim this document. Furthermore, as well as providing documentation for developers on usability and user interface design practice, the GUP actively works with developers and maintainers to find existing interaction problems through user testing. Claiming that "no one but a propellerhead could love [GNOME]" shows an impressive lack of attention to recent news in the FLOSS community. In 2002, the regional government of Extremadura, Spain installed 80,000 computers -- running GNOME -- in schools, public administration, and enterprises across the region; I highly doubt that all 160,000 users (each computer is shared between two users) who have benefited from this venture are propellerheads. More recently, the Chinese government have announced plans to use GNOME on 200 million desktops, and in August, U.K.'s National Health Service announced the purchase of 5,000 licenses for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java Desktop System, which is based on GNOME. None of these ventures seem to me to be indicative of GNOME being a propellerhead-only desktop. Finally, the Gnome Accessibility Project (GAP; http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/) has developed a suite of software services and support, allowing people with disabilities to fully utilize the GNOME desktop, in conjunction with assistive technologies (screen readers, eye-trackers, head-mounted pointers, etc.) if necessary. Once again, this kind of project seems to directly counter Michelle and Greg's assertion that usability is not a critical concern for GNOME. I'm aware that the discussion of usability and GNOME is not on-topic for this list, however, inaccuracy about something that is as easy to fact-check as GNOME's usability intiative does not lend credibility to the rest of the article. As it happens, I don't agree with some of the authors' more specific comments regarding the reasons for the lack of women in the FLOSS community, but I am concerned that readers may be discouraged from taking the more general concerns about the small numbers of women involved in free and open source software projects seriously, dismissing them as being as erroneous as the article's assertions about the GNOME community. -- hanna m. wallach blog: http://join-the-dots.org/ work: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/hmw26/
