The trouble with open-source
There is a disease endemic to open-source software projects. Almost all of them have web sites that fail to accomplish the fundamental task that every web site should accomplish: explaining what the damn thing is.
I’m sorry to pick on fish, but it’s as good an example as any, and it’s one I stumbled on today courtesy of the ever-useful Mac OS X Hints. fish is a “user friendly” command-line shell, built to replace the likes of traditional shells like bash and csh. (Mac OS X uses bash by default.) Sounds good so far.
Except nowhere on the home page does it explain what fish does. Shouldn’t this be the most obvious thing on the page? There is a link to a mostly-empty wiki, and there is of course the ubiquitous “list of recent changes”, which no open-source project can live without.
There are screenshots, but, um, this is a command-line shell. On the screenshots page, they even say, “Since fish is a text based program, it is not very well suited for screenshots.” Yeah.
In order to find out what fish is, the web site actually recommends reading an article on some other web site.
Open-source programmers of the world, hear this! Tell me what your software does before you bother telling me about what’s changed in every single version. If I’ve never used the software, why would I care how it’s changed?
It isn’t that hard to write a bulleted list of features or a couple of sentences summarizing the point of the software.
End of rant.