OStatic

I've seen a certain amount of gloating recently in the open source press about a memo from Bill Gates that the Seattle PI recently dug up. You know the one, probably: Bill tries to install some software from the Net, and ends up flaming his people for a couple of pages with choice bits like "The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind." But so what?

Sure, it's fun to watch Bill Gates writing nastygrams about anything - like him or hate him, he's good at expressing his viewpoint. But you know what? This one memo, dug up five years ago as part of those interminable court proceedings, doesn't mean a thing about the current state of Windows usability, stability, or anything else.

If you learn to cherry-pick from the entire output of any given software leader, you can find some doozies. For example, here's Linus Torvalds writing about GNOME a couple of years ago:

I've talked to people, and often your "fixes" are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were "too confusing to the user".

That's _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse users".

So, parts of the Microsoft ecosystem have had issues that came to Bill's attention, and parts of the Linux ecosystem have had issues that came to Linus's attention. The key point is not that these two leaders ran into problems - but that they cared enough to make their feelings known in appropriate spots where the developers of the software could actually respond and act on them.

If you really care about the quality of operating systems, don't waste your time laughing at the past gaffes of an OS you don't like. Spend it improving an OS you do like - whether that means pointing out flaws or, better yet, rolling up your coding sleeves and fixing them. That's the point of open source, after all.

• Windows
• linux
• torvalds
• Bill Gates