[mythtv-users] Why Free Software has poor usability ?

[Jason Antman]

I missed most of the "action" on this thread, but just wanted to throw 
in a comment here - I think Jedidiah hit the nail right on the head. I'm 
a great fan of Free Software, and release most of my own code under the 
GPL - and have experienced the users' "just works" expectation from a 
developer's point of view.

We must not forget that, unlike most commercial software targeted 
towards non-technical end-users, the goal of a *good* F/OSS package is 
_not_ to make a one-size-fits-all solution, but (at least for a project 
like MythTV that couples both the interface and the backend) to allow 
_relative_ ease-of-use while still retaining the options that advanced 
users require. While the usability of Free Software, especially that for 
Linux, has increased dramatically since I started using it 7 years ago, 
it's still a world driven by volunteer developers. While the "just 
works" aspect has gotten better in many ways (even compared to when I 
started using MythTV a few years ago), it's still not a world where an 
end-user can assume that, with their (perhaps pseudo-random) selection 
of hardware, software X will do Y as expected without any modification 
or research.

-J Antman

JEDIDIAH wrote:
> Also keep in mind that building your own PVR is going to just be
> inherently complex. Just take something like IR blasters as an
> example. Even setting up one of these with a Tivo is going to 
> probably take a fair amount of fiddling around and this is something
> that's an "appliance".
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