OSS and Deaf Developers?

I came across this rant about feature requests in Gnome. I have to confess a sense of siding with the OSS developers on this one.

The author of the editorial doesn't get into full swing until she quotes the following statement from the Gnome web site:

A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it.

She then extrapolates this to imply that no OSS developer is going to implement a feature request unless she has a personal use for that feature. This reasoning is both myopic and parochial.

The truth is, when you're working on a product that's intended for a wide variety of users, individual feature requests tend to be of limited value. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in hearing your particular feature requests, because that's not the point. Within the dross of anecdotal feature requests, there's still the chance that one of them will turn out to be a gem. The truth is, however, that the vast majority of individual feature requests turn out to be bad ideas.

Perhaps an example will clarify the point. A long time ago, a user suggested that we bring back the "Style Area" feature. The feature was, and currently is, a preference in the "View" panel (you set the "width" of the style are). When that width is greater than 0, then Word displays the style of a paragraph to the left of the paragraph. This only works in "Normal" view.

That was the feature request, but it told me nothing about his problem that he was trying to solve. Well, it turns out that he had to review documents to see if they adhered to corporate style guidelines. In order to do this, he needed to be able to see both the style that's applied to a paragraph and any direct formatting that's been applied in addition to the style.

Well, in Word 2004, we shipped a feature that solves his high-level problem far more elegantly than the old style area solved it. This is in the "Style" area of the formatting palette. Word lists all the styles, and instances of styles plus various forms of direct formatting, that exist in your document. Each item in the list box is also a drop-down menu that provides the ability to select all instances of that list item's combination of underlying style plus direct formatting.

With this feature, our user can now solve his particular problem by simply choosing "Select All" in the drop-down menu for combinations that don't match his company's style guidelines. He can then correct them all at once. If we'd just given him is direct feature request instead of trying to understand his real problem, he'd still be searching through these documents one paragraph at a time; a task that would have taken him hours to perform on a single document can now be completed in just a few minutes.

So, I think the OSNews editorial is misplaced. The difference between OSS and what we do isn't in the extent to which we listen to what customers have to say. Rather, the really significant difference is the effort we put into understanding users' high-level problems. That's a very costly, and time-consuming effort. It's not a job that hobbyist programmers, no matter how dedicated, can reasonably hope to accomplish.

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: Lakeside Park by Rush

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2005
  Call it luck, call it fluke but irrespective of resources some of use are able to take the time to evaluate feedback and try to consider the big picture.
  
  Quite often I think Open Source gets lucky. Release early and release often makes for a lot of feedback. Better projects make efforts to look at existing solutions and evalate waht works and why. This can provide valuable ideas so long as developers are mature enough to realise competitors have good ideas too and make good use of the idea of embrace and extend. "Managers" (which usually turns out to be anyone on the team who takes the lead and acts with a certain amoutn of maturity) can often get users to explain the real problem they are actually having by asking the right questions. The general caution more importantly the time constraints of developers ensures that features dont get implemented without getting a certian minimun level of review.
  
  It is worth noting that sometimes Open Source developers are simply good developers who are familiar with what it takes to develop software irrespective of the license it will be released under. Sometimes philosophical disagreements dont make much difference at all.

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2005
  It's not about luck. It's not even about competence as developers. It's about capacity and resources.

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2005
  > It's not about luck. It's not even about competence as developers. It's about capacity and resources.
  
  And luckily, successful open source projects have heaps of all four.

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2005
  "Eugenia doesn't represents OSS users/developers"
  
  Lots of gnome developers are people from Sun/Redhat/Novell who get paid to develop what customers want. Gnome developers also don't care a lot about personal preferences in some places, ej: usability (one of the principles of gnome's HIG is that usability must not be based in personal preferences but in scientific facts)

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2005
  Rick many people associate Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) with Corrupt Disks and the Entertainment Industry trying to rollback fiar use and the modern day equivalents of taping off the radio or making mix tapes for friends.
  
  I understand that some people choose to also use the term DRM to refer to document encryption and signing. That is of course very useful functionality but you shouldn't be too suprised if people think of something a bit different when you describe it as DRM.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  > It's about capacity and resources.
  
  There is a lot of truth in that.
  
  In case it wasn't clear my first comment was in reaction to Ricks closing statement:
  
  > "It's not a job that hobbyist programmers, no matter how dedicated, can reasonably hope to accomplish."
  
  It may not be a 'reasonable hope' :) but I continue to be amazed what can be accomplished by open source developement. There are all kinds of problems that seem insurmountable but can be broken down into smaller more managable problems.
  
  

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  Rick : Somehow I doubt the MS DRM master plan is going work on Office for Mac - and certainly not on current Macs. If it does, its snake oil : you can't expect people to believe in a cryptography system where attackers are given the algorithm, the keys, and the ciphertext? Because all the use cases for Office DRM include ridiculous "you can read this but not print it or copy it" capabilities. This is clearly ludicrous without total control of the hardware and operating system : ie an "Obey Microsoft" switch on the computer. I doubt this will be very popular in Windows land, let alone Mac land. And real tamperproof hardware isn't going to be cheap...
  
  And re the xml format: when are you changing the default format to something other than a binary mess?

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  <a href="http://localhost:8008/soapbox.html#20050313">I beg to differ</a>.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  Erik: Don't take that single example as representative of the whole gamut of work we do in order to understand users above the level of features.
  
  Bunk: I'm not aware of any "Master plan" for DRM. As far as Office is concerned, it's a feature-one that some of our customers have asked for. I have no knowledge of what DRM means outside of Office, and it would be irrelevant to this discussion.
  
  Dave: I didn't attend Cory's talk, but I've read the transcript. Cory's analysis is off the mark when it comes to document-based scenarios within corporations. The DVD scenario that forms the basis of his talk doesn't even operate with respect to corporate data.
  

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  http://ghettographics.org/bi/soapbox.html#20050313

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  I'm aware of the difference between DVDs and Office documents, and how the social elements Cory talks about do not apply in small scale distributions. However, I can't see how anything you can do with DRM in Office is going to affect the simple fact that if someone can read it on a screen, they can take a photo with their camera-phone or, if they're feeling old skool, write it down.
  
  Am I missing something and/or is MSFT marketing letting the side down in conveying how Office DRM can help customers with "keeping their information confidential" (particularly anything that they can't achieve by keeping the information private)? Maybe what I perceive as a false sense of security being sold to your users is a result of my own lack of understanding.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  Rick,
  
  Its a feature that makes no sense. If it is just signing and encrypting documents, fine. If it includes elements of control after decryption, then it can never work. Scenarios "within corporations" are no different than between random people on the internet. You either want control or you don't : if it is just an advisory " the sender doesn't want you to print this", then treat it as such rather than peddling snake oil. We should be beyond XOR-ing with Microsoft Barney by now ( google for it).
  
  DRM in Office cannot work without total machine control. If you have no knowledge of that, how can you state that DRM in Office will actually fulfill a customer goal, rather than curtail a huge number of other customer goals? Eg Having any trust in their computer at all? I certainly won't trust a DRM'ed computer.
  
  I think that is very relevant: Your purpose is not to listen to customer goals, it is to find ways to entrench and extend the Office monopoly. Sadly, your particular area of this seems to be to provide evidence that Microsoft does have desktop competitors in the next antitrust trial...
  
  

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  Dave and Bunk, I think you completely misaprehend what corporate customers want out of DRM. Sorry, but I'm not going to explain it to you either. I'll give you a hint, though. Total control over distribution isn't the point.
  

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  It must be great to be safe in the knowledge that you can think you won an argument by pointedly not explaining your points and acting smug about it. Not explaining your point of view is something Microsoft does very well: you've lived up to your companys reputation by ignoring criticism and assuming you know better. Congratulations, Rick.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2005
  Could any other readers shed some light or provide some links on the Office DRM features?
  
  A quick Google for Office DRM produces the following link, to a MSDN blog, which makes the Office 'DRM' sound a bit cumbursome rather than 'secure', despite the blog author's faith that it will all work out in the end. The comments are interesting too.
  
  http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2004/09/15/230012.aspx
  
  Surely there's more to it than that? Anyone?

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2005
  Bunk, I haven't ignored the criticism despite the fact that it's off-base to the original point. I've been circumspect about stating the specific scenario where DRM is useful, and gave a rather whopping hint such that anyone who would care to spend a few minutes thinking about it could figure it out. The irony is that the exchange only serves to underscore my original point.
  
  Dave, you might try going to a large organization, talk to some of our customers, and ask them why they might want to have the feature. You can't do sound customer research via Google.
  

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2005
  Benjamin, just out of curiosity, by what objective standard do you conclude that I don't care about file compatibility, data integrity, focus, quality, usability or price?
  

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2005
  Well, for one thing I agree with the Existentialists in that no one can be objective. What I can say is I have used Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher, WordPerfect, Lotus WordPro, Lotus 123, OpenOffice.org (mainly writer), Pages, Keynote, and Mellel. The last 3 were the best by far, but OpenOffice.org is good for Windows or Linux users. Publisher was ok. The Microsoft programs especially Word and Excel crashed very frequently as well as Windows. I was also very disappointed by the graphical quality and the HTML output of Word. Classmates were unable to open Word documents with products like WordPerfect or lower versions of Word. The price is more than I can afford especially for what it does at the quality you get and how much effort it takes to even get acceptable results. As far as focus, Mellel as well as iWork are examples of great focus - iWork is great with multimedia - how it integrates so well with iLife, the ease at which you can create graphical documents from already designed layouts, the highest quality output in the industry standard PDF format and Mellel is great at academic and technical writing with excellent support for any language, footnotes, bibliography, and all sorts of structured document markup - like LaTeX but without having to mess with code. Another big sign of sloppiness is how much memory Word takes compared to Mellel: Mellel takes 1 MB of RAM, Word takes over 40 MB. Another is how big the files are - if you take an average Word document and open it up with any degree of success with OpenOffice.org (and the only reason why you can at all is because they reverse engineered it) and then save it, it will be 1/3 the size roughly. The fact that Microsoft produces such low quality products drove me towards Linux at first an then to Macintosh when Jaguar came out. When I said you I meant the development effort at Microsoft. You are one of the developers, so I expect that you feel somewhat responsible for what you produce and who you work for.

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2005
  DRM is "control after decryption". This is ridiculous and won't work without total machine control. If it is advisory, "the sender does not want you to print this" then it isn't secure and is not really DRM.
  
  You have not explained any scenario that doesn't fit into these categories. I imagine that you are thinking of an advisory system that is trivially broken : this is not really DRM, and if you are marketing it as "control your documents", it is snake oil.
  
  Please answer explicitly rather than snidely this time. You aren't doing yourself any favours with this attitude.

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2005
  Benjamin,
  
  Thank you for the feedback, and I say that in all honesty. I much prefer a more carefully-considered criticism like your second comment to your first comment, which struck me as being mostly snide.
  
  I'll take issue with the Mellel-Word memory usage comparison for a couple of reasons. First, I have no idea what number you're referring to, but Word's running VSIZE is about 217 MB with an empty document. By comparision, BBEdit's VSIZE is 153 MB with an empty document. Secondly, a single memory size comparison isn't all that meaningful. How do they compare, for example, when each has a very large document open? What about the number and size of graphics in the document?
  
  I've yet to find a really objective measure of "quality" that allows one to say that one software product is of higher quality than another. One has to account for usage patterns and feature sets. It turns out that "quality" ends up being a somewhat squishy subject.
  
  All that said, I'm glad you've found products that work for you. It's perfectly fine with me if people purchase another product than mine because that product works for their needs.
  
  Bunk,
  
  Sorry, but you're missing the entire point. Your DRM argument is, well, bunk. Either DRM works, in which case the user benefit is obvious, or DRM doesn't work in which case you can't reasonably claim that the purpose is to lock users in to Microsoft's products. You can't make that argument work both ways, no matter how hard you try or how often you accuse me of being smug and/or non-responsive.
  
  You've inferred a motive based on a self-defeating argument when, in fact, a far more simple motive exists for why DRM was added to Win Office: that one or more rather large customers told us that they wouldn't buy our product if DRM wasn't there.
  
  Now, I claim that there is a real scenario for which DRM is a viable solution even if it can be by-passed, and I also claim that one can figure out what that scenario is if one actually thinks about the kinds of ways by which information "leaks". Neither of those claims is necessary to counter your rather obviously flawed argument.
  
  I point to the existence of this scenario not in an effort to be snide or smug. I point it out because the issue is my initial statement about a fundamental difference between a well-funded, proprietary development process and a not-so-well funded, open source development process. The fact that you have yet to tumble upon the specifics of the scenario where DRM actually works serves to underscore my point.
  

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2005
  Bunk,
  
  First of all, you're conflating two rather different issues. Your initial argument with respect to DRM was about "securing and extending [a] monopoly." This can't possibly be the case, as my last comment shows. If DRM can be circumvented, then there is no possible way to use DRM for the purposes of "securing and extending [a] monopoly."
  
  That only leaves one possibility: that we've done DRM in response to customer demands. The mere fact that you don't see how customers might actually want DRM, even if it can be circumvented by a number of different means, doesn't change this.
  
  As for snake oil, the only way we can be selling snake oil is if one assumes that the people who've been asking for the feature are unaware of the limitations of software-implemented DRM. Assuming that money-paying customers are ignorant, while quite possibly convenient for pejorative rhetorical purposes, is never a good idea when your livelihood depends on selling your products to them :-).
  
  Now, do you really want to continue to press an argument based on a set of assumptions that, demonstrably, have no connection to reality? Or, are you going to think about customer scenarios under which a potentially circumventable DRM might still be a desireable feature? In an environment where the most significant deterrent to "leaking" confidential information is losing one's job and potential civil penalties, how do most "leaks" occur?
  

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2005
  Bunk,
  
  I said that you were conflating issues, not scenarios. That you only admit two scenarios is generally known as the fallacy of the excluded middle. You are, nonetheless, conflating the question of the utility of DRM in Office with the issue of "securing and extending [a] monopoly." That's a quote of your words.
  
  The rest of your comments are predicated on this fallacy, and, therefore, don't merit any kind of rhetorical response.
  
  And, sadly, I'm not surprised that people don't trust Microsoft. I wonder how many times I'll have to repeat the fact that DRM exists in Office because some rather large organizations said they wouldn't buy the product unless we added it before you'll just flat out accuse me of lying about it.
  
  There are those who won't trust Microsoft no matter what we do. You're doing an excellent job of convincing me that you belong to that group.
  

• Anonymous
  March 16, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 16, 2005
  Bunk,
  
  Hate groups can use Word to promulgate ideas that lead to violence in various forms. By your reasoning, the fact that Word can be used for this purpose implies that we should stop selling Word altogether.
  
  As for "political speech monitoring tools," exactly how might such tools differ from SPAM filters?
  
  You can certainly accuse me of being a sycophant, but one would hope that you'd come up with a far better argument upon which to base that accusation.
  

• Anonymous
  March 17, 2005
  Bunk,
  If companies don't believe in using DRM, they don't have to use it.
  
  For those companies to whom DRM is critical to their business practices, Microsoft would be silly not to give them the functionality that they're wanting.
  
  Microsoft is in the business of selling platforms. Windows is a platform. Office is a platform. Our customers desire that those platforms have certain features, including DRM (in both Windows (Media) and Office). They have different reasons for asking for the DRM functionality, but they have a legitimate right to ask for DRM functionality.
  
  Microsoft has two choices. #1: They can say "DRM is evil" so we won't allow you to do DRM. Or they can say "We've got a solution for you".
  
  Which of the two is likely to result in customers buying our product? And which is likely to result in the customer going to a competitor who doesn't have the same issues with DRM?
  
  The customers who want DRM have decided that they have a business NEED for the functionality. They're going to get that functionality whether you want it or not, the ONLY question is if they remain your customers or if they go and become someone elses customer.
  

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2005
  Roy,
  
  No slight was intended. As I've mentioned in other comments in this thread, the issue is really a matter of having the resources available to conduct market research. You need an income stream from the software in order to do that, and the only model that provides a sufficient income stream would be one akin to Apple's model.
  

• Anonymous
  March 23, 2006
  What people ask for and what they want are not always the same thing.

• Anonymous
  March 23, 2006
  The comment has been removed

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