Indian Geek's Blog

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Open Source GUI

There is huge discussion on Slashdot recently and also in many other OSS forums about why open source GUI is not good. Here is my opinion.

It is a simple answer, designing GUI is a different skill than programming. It requires lot of analysis, lot of common sense and constant interaction with the end users. It also has to go through several iterations in order to reach a decent output. So obviously most of the programmers feel this boring and difficult aspect. So only people who have flair for it or who are being paid for it only will be to do such job. Open source development is often voluntary and very few people would be interested in such a job. Even in the commercial world the companies are struggling to find good UI designers (I don't mean graphical designers). In way this is similar to the 'documentation' problem in open source projects, the only difference this is much tougher job.