

The Maximal Usage Doctrine of OSS (or: Why Having Users is a Good Thing) - wycats
http://yehudakatz.com/2010/01/05/the-maximal-usage-doctrine-for-open-source/

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blasdel
This is absolutely true when your users are naturally programmers: libraries
and frameworks benefit more from network effects than any other not-
inherently-viral software I know of. The users can, do, must contribute!
Everybody gets their warm fuzzies.

The opposite is the case for end-user open-source software -- users are a
fucking curse unless you can sell support and they're throwing money around.
When your users contribute it's by generally by giving crap cargo-cult advice
on disparate web forums, if you're lucky they'll use email lists to complain
and bike-shed, if you're real lucky they'll design terrible themes for your
app using copyright-infringing artwork. They'll do marketing for you, but
they'll base it on the features you hate, bring in more digg/reddit/lifehacker
'power user' types, and promote pointless forks.

