hello friends,

this is my first post here and it might be bit annoying and it might also get me banned from this forum but somewhere i found this true.

actually i visited this link http://connectallprogrammers.com/index.php?topic=138.0

it says that why open source is not so popular among mass.

It says because "Designed my programmers , Designed for programmers"..

and somewhere this post is quite true.

please comment friends to tell me whether i am right or wrong.
and that guy also who has posted that article there

Mostly doing a quick glance-over, that poster has a fairly narrow-sighted POV. The "Designed by programmers, designed for programmers" may be true in a number of cases - there are a lot of projects that that is the entire goal and that is fine. Once a (non programmer-oriented) project reaches a certain size (number of users, number of contributors) that is no longer true. A community of users forms around the project and from that community comes voices of non-programmers who want to influence the direction of the project. If the developers are smart they will listen, they will accept the feedback and contributions and the project will grow from a single-man project to a distributed, community-driven project. At that point it is no longer "Designed by programmers for programmers", but designed by people/the community for people.
You can hardly say that such projects as Firefox, and Libre/OpenOffice are "Designed by programmers for programmers" when they are clearly designed to be used by every-day people. Firefox has been eating away at IE not just because it is faster but because it is easier to use (by non-programmers), and more secure (Google Chrome same story). Libre/OpenOffice may not be on par with MS Office yet, but it works for the needs of the majority of (non-programmer) people.
On the other hand, there are a lot of closed source projects that are equally "Designed by programmers for programmers". The difference is that while the open source projects are generally started publicly online, a lot of such projects don't reach the public because they never break free from the "Designed by programmers for programmers" phase - reaching a level of quality+stability+security to be used outside of the group of programmers who designed it.

It seems that the root of the guy's complaint is that they had some bad experience with a particular open source project and was trying to write it up as being a symptom of all open source projects - the classic: my experience is everyone's experience, or rather: this small, struggling project has problems and is open source, so I'm going to make the easy assumption that all open source projects suffer from similar problems.

The truth is that each project needs to be evaluated for what it is and avoid letting one-size-fits-all stereotypes influence your opinions. Take a look and make your own opinions.

The author of the post takes a half truth and, as airdrik says, tries to generalise it. Studies of the motivation of free and open source programmers show that they have many motivations among which enjoyment is an important one; but the very start of the free software movement came when in 1983 Richard Stallman wanted to change a Xerox printer file so that he could use it and found he was not allowed to. So it arose because Richard, as a programmer, wanted to do something for himself.

But the start of open source came about in 1988 because Intel wanted to popularise use of one of its engineering chips and gave away the source code - that was ten years before the term 'open source' was invented. Out of the that Michael Tiemann set up what became Cygnus Solutions - now part of RedHat - to support developers and companies like IBM realised that collaborative open source development was far more efficient that in-house development. So they began to invest heavily in free and open source.

Free software completely dominates super-computing and the embedded computing markets; it has a major slice of the server market and is increasingly taking over the mobile 'phone market; most desktop programs are now free or open source even though Windows still dominates the desktop market and MS Office the office suite market.

This would not have happened if there were any fundamental failings in the free and open source software development models. That doesn't mean there aren't individual cases where things could have been handled better and there was an interesting talk at Akademy a couple of years ago about how the free and open source models that have been so successful in the West do not necessarily translate easily to some Eastern cultures. But that doesn't mean that alternative models won't emerge in due course as people understand how to adapt Western models to their cultures.

In a way the poster may have a point. OS software usually becomes available very early in it's development cycle. It may even still be full of bugs. What happens next varies. Some one else may think that's great and do even more work on it. Some software just lies there and doesn't progress. Popular applications invariably reach what could be called a professional gloss rather quickly. At this stage they should be usable by anybody.

There is a sort of catch in this area though. OS software can evolve just because a particular person or group of specialists may want it to do something specific that will interest few other people. This can make things like configuration and available facilities bewildering for some. A good example of this is say the gimp in relationship to paintshop pro. Here the linux software has completely lost sight of people who are used to using a package like paintshop. On the other hand linux software is often far more flexible than typical windows applications. In fact the entire system is which can lead people to believe that it's only suitable for programmers. That aspect is currently being attacked by distro's like Kubutu. Many long term users aren't too keen on that approach which is unfortunately spreading in several areas.

One really beneficial aspect of os is that it's often possible to communicate with the developers directly. This means that users can influence what applications actually do. Developers can't be expected to take on all ideas but those which are likely to be popular often appear in the software very quickly. There is a downside here though - sometimes a user may feel that something or the other is completely wrong and have to put up with it for ever.

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There are a lot of open source tools that are designed by programmers, for programmers.. That's nothing new...

IMO, the primary reason why Open Source hasn't caught on yet is two reasons..

The first being that the major game companies that pour millions upon millions of dollars into their games, are simply not targeting Linux at all. Even computers 5 years old can browse Facebook, a lot of people are buying new PCs to play games.

The second, companies such as Adobe release a great product for Windows and then do a sloppy job at supporting their applications and players on Linux, making Linux look bad. The good news here is that there are open standards that can replace everything that Adobe does.