Topic “usability”

Usability vs Purity in Open Source

In Chapter 4 of From Coding to Community, I discussed how open source software's struggle with usability can be understood, in part, as a conflict between the procedural tropes of iteration and abstraction. Today, Matt Asay blogged about another important aspect of this struggle: the free software movement's tendency to cling to purity with religious fervor.

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From Coding to Community: Iteration, Abstraction & Open Source Software Development is a self-published book by Brad Weikel, adapted from his Masters thesis of the same name. This book is an exploration of iteration and abstraction in the practices of programming, as these concepts relate to the politics and production of FOSS projects. Iteration, in this context, refers to the writing of software through incremental changes, leaving it ever subject to further modifications. Abstraction, on the other hand, refers to the use of interfaces to hide complexity, thereby enabling new relations between code and people. (Read More)
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