RT @jacobian The power of “no”

Can you retweet a blog post emanating from a tweet? On the day that Radio 4 hails the mighty Twitter onto the world political stage, I think anything is admissible ;)

Jacob Kaplan-Moss made a very insightful tweet which can be summed up thus:

“Closed-source software gets worse with each release (Microsoft, Adobe, …). Open-source software gets better (OOo, Ubuntu, …). Discuss.”

And then followed it up with a blog post entitled The power of “no”:

“closed source software seems prone to featuritis, to bloatware, to a trend of more bullet points at the expense of elegance. Open source seems mostly immune to these pressures.”

And the reason? The power of “no”. The power of the people actually developing the software to say “no”, over the marketeers and managers, so that technical quality is paramount.

Interesting stuff, and something that is echoed by the Drupal CMS developers/contributors Development Seed, who are arguing for a smallcore approach to Drupal, making it more of Content Management Framework rather than an out-of-the-box Content Management System.

This is backed up by the User Experience Designer Leisa Reichelt, who worked with Mark Boulton on the Drupal 7 D7UX project. Her post entitled Designing for the wrong target audience (or why Drupal should be a developer tool and not a consumer product) pretty much sums it up. In the words of Steve Ballmer, it's about Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!, when it's the developers who are the target audience.