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

[seeker5528 at comcast.net]

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Param Singh" <mithu.singh at gmail.com>
> >> Have you never worked on commercial software? I think all of these
> >> could apply to any commercial software I worked on, plus more.
> 
> >> I believe most of these apply to Microsoft software.
> 
> 
> IMO, the notion behind sharing this article was to discuss if we ( as
> mythtv community ) are lacking in any of those points mentioned in the
> article; rather than pointing fingers and drawing comparisons.
> 
> ~param

Myth TV has had it's share of usability issues and there are still some things that could be better, but there is good reason for that.

Basically Myth TV started as the idea of one guy who said to himself 'Self, I want to create software to do this, and I want to do it in Linux'. At the time there was nothing competing in the Linux space and not much to see and pattern the software after, so yeah, there was some trial and error. Surely there were some (I expect probably many) decisions made there were less than optimal, but necessary because hardware management and driver support were not as good as they are today, in particular with TV cards. 

So in earlier days just getting your hardware all to work outside of Myth TV could at times require a bit of luck. Between MySQL and the way options were presented in Myth TV configuration could be, uhm, error prone, to say the least. And upgrading could be painful.

Fast forward to today, the work that has gone in to Myth TV has been impressive. The core developers have made good decisions about where they need to spend the bulk of their development efforts to move things forward, communicate with developers that want to create add ons, work with the theming people, directly or indirectly get feedback on real issues that real users are having. From there it goes back to the developers making good decisions about where to spend the bulk of their development efforts to keep the project moving forward.

While I would say the article on usability is interesting and accurate and I expect the follow ups on how to do things better will be interesting and useful, it is one sided, it doesn't say anything about the projects that are doing things well, and I would put Myth TV in the category of projects that are doing things well.

Later, Seeker