As you can see from my original comment, I’m no knee-jerk defender of private sector innovation, but I don’t think I agree with this. I love open source software, but the UI is often clunky and unintuitive, like Gimp or LibreOffice. Even when it’s good, it’s often because it mimics the major commercial software.
The heuristic I have is, when the end result benefits from communal information sharing, public is hands down better than private. We have an opioid crisis today because privatized proprietary medical research didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the scientific community as public research. Science and secrecy are incompatible.
But when the end result benefits from a small group of opinionated people getting their way, private can sometimes be better. And good design is more like the latter.
3laws@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Open source projects don’t excel at it either, it took GNOME 20 years to stop looking frozen since the 90s. KDE is a toggle and checkmark mess.
Only the users know how to cater themselves, AOSP derivatives, UNIX/Linux rice, seasoned designers copylefting/giving away typefaces and assets, orgs advocating and implementing accessibility options in video games, etc, etc.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Open source projects have trouble getting designers to help, or developers that want to implement the designers vision
My point was that even UI/UX research falls into the same categories mentioned by the other poster - most of the research is being done publicly and the private sector is just implementing it and selling it as cheaply as possible, same as the example of GPS