alt Hacker News> The weird thing in my opinion: why is open source software such a pain to use? They don't have commercial interests?
My guess is its a combination of 1) lack of resources and 2) being developed for the developers themselves (who are weird users).
Most of the best open source software (e.g. Linux) is that way because commercial interests have incentive to pour some of their vast resources into it (and if copyright was ever abolished, expect it to start sucking, because the main reason we get to seee the commercially-funded improvements is the genius of the GPL).
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2 often translates practically to "designed by a committee", which surprise: isn't always very good or usable.
Why bother abolishing something that is obsolete?
Even the GPL isn't needed anymore when you can trivially reverse engineer nearly anything.
You're certainly right about 1), but why 2) needs to be the end of things, I don't know.
Clearly, open source software with a good interface becomes more popular. I suspect, being popular isn't really a good experience for the developer, who then gets inundated with unreasonable requests etc.