If there is nothing to cite from supporting your claims, and all these statements are just picked out of the air, you still have a chance of proving yourself. Look up the word Meritocracy, then go follow your own suggestions. When you have done so, and either failed or succeeded in making a well-designed, popular, useful FLOSS program, please report back on which suggestions worked, and which didn’t. And delete this useless post.

But criticism needs to be focused in order to be effective. You offer a list of generalizations above, but it’s hard to know what you mean without specific examples. Why not point to particular features of particular projects that illustrate your points? You don’t need to worry about ruffling particular people’s feathers—I certainly don’t.

I could reference quite a huge list of proprietary applications that I find quite unusable compared to their free software alternatives, some widely used (eg. Adobe Reader), but many more from smaller companies. Oddly enough, I can also cite a quite a list of free software applications that I find quite unusable, some widely used, but many more from smaller developer teams. Perhaps poor usability has something to do with more complex issues, like quality and size of the development team, both positive and negative influences of marketing and accounting departments over design, whether developers are focused on user experience or other goals altogether, whether a company managed to so dominate a market many years ago that it can now get away with ignoring the fact that its painful early 90′s UI should have evolved, etc. IMHO, your article completely missed the boat in asserting a proprietary vs. free software explanation.