[UFO Chicago] what draws you here?

[Michael Bryan Bell]

> What has not yet been addressed satisfactorily are all those
> things that seem ancillary, and yet are so essential to
> widespread public appeal--items such as human factors and
> man-machine interface design; appliance-user-level
> documentation; training; bulletproof OS installation on new
> hardware; bulletproof applications installation; seamless
> interoperability with the incumbent platforms; and the like.
> And no, I'm not saying that Windows actually robustly
> provides all of these things, but Windows' veneer
> implementations work OK for many users and the depth
> increases as new versions are shipped.  There are a number
> of reasons these items have not been well attended to in
> most "Free"/Open Source software:

This is just out of my own curiosity...

But is there is there a visionary leader type or organization within  the
open-source software community that is pushing for those things, or at the
very least taking stock of them?

Ie, has a group or organization sat down and said, "these are the barriers
to consumer desktop adoption- lets sit down and figure them all out, and
then come up with a plan to address every single one of them over the next 5
years."

I can completely see what Neil is saying regarding the programmers working
on the things that interest them most... But surely in such a large group
(red hat, debian, freebsd, openbsd, mandrake, slackware, etc) there has to
be an organization of some type to specifically address the above and put
together a plan?

Or are the groups just too splintered?

Thanks,

-- 
Michael Bryan Bell

http://homepage.mac.com/michael_bell/