Users of Open source software are either the product or are irrelevant
Users of software often believe that the people who produced it are interested in the views and opinions of their users.
In a commercial environment there are producers who are interested in what users have to say, because of the financial incentive, and some Open source software exists within this framework, e.g., companies selling support services for the code they have Open sourced.
Without a commercial framework why would any producer of Open source be interested in the views and opinions of users? Answers include:
- users are the product: I have met developers who are strongly motivated by the pleasure they get from being at the center of a community, i.e., the community of people using the software that they are actively involved in creating,
- users are irrelevant: other developers are more strongly motivated by the pleasure of building things and in particular building using what are considered to be the right tools and techniques, i.e., the good-enough approach is not considered to be good-enough.
How do these Open source dynamics play out in the evolution of software systems?
It is the business types who are user oriented or rather source of money oriented. They are the people who stop developers from upsetting customers by introducing incompatibilities with previous releases, in fact a lot of the time its the business types pushing developers to concentrate on fixing problems and not wasting time doing more interesting stuff.
Keeping existing customers happy often means that products change slowly and gradually ossify (unless the company involved has a dominant market position that forces users to take what they are given).
A project primarily fueled its developers’ desire for pleasure cannot stand still, it has to change. Users who complain that change has an impact on their immediate need for compatibility get told that today’s pain is necessary for a brighter future tomorrow.
An example of users as the product is gcc. Companies pay people to work on gcc because they want access to the huge amount of software written by ‘the product’ using gcc.
As example of users as irrelevant is llvm. Apple is paying for llvm to happen and what does this have to do with anybody else using it?
The users of Angular.js now know what camp they are in.
As Bob Dylan pointed out: “Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”
In a commercial environment there are producers who are interested in what users have to say
There are. But in the general case producers only care what users say when it is derogatory and they publish it. Otherwise they are only interested in how much consumer surplus they can extract.