Give me that old time software
Andrew Brown in the Grauniad is writing books in Open Office, but thinks that it’s the evidence against Eric Raymond’s “Many eyes make bugs shallow”. You know what? I think that the reason why OOo is buggy and annoying is because it is recreating unexciting rather than forcing us to rethink. I use LyX, which is software which forces you to rethink. It took me a week or two to adapt to ‘WYSIWYM’, but I now write better essays as a result.
Good software forces you to mentally reconsider what you are doing, to adapt to the software. The essence of “users and developers partying together” isn’t that the developer should be a servant to the user, but that the user should also let the developer take the reins and lead you down different and interesting paths, or at least make it easy for users to do so.
In Dave Winer’s description of OPML, he describes how different people see different things: “Every creative person brings his or her two cents to defining what computers are, what they do, and how they do it”. When I see OpenOffice, or it’s closed source daddy, Microsoft Office, I see boredom, wasting time and hindrances. That’s my personal reaction, of course.
I don’t want an open source Word. I don’t want an open source Word replacement. I want an open source Word destroyer (almost as much as I want an open source PowerPoint or Publisher destroyer). I want something to blow my brains out and carry me to a more creative place. The more something does that, the more I think it’s good software.
