I don't know if this has been posted before, but Matthew Thomas has
posted a seering review of open-source UI designs which hits close to
home for us.

	http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/04/13

What can we do to avoid the fate of Mozilla's UI?  Do we need a UI tsar
to avoid disaster?  Or, is there a way to make entire UI's be swappable
in and out, so that people can make up UI's in a decentralized way and
thus let the market work it out?


Here's a bit of flamage copied from the article:

"As in a professional project, in a volunteer project there will be
times when the contributors disagree on a design issue. Where
contributors are paid to work on something, they have an incentive to
carry on even if they disagree with the design. Where volunteers are
involved, however, it's much more likely that the project maintainer
will agree to add a user preference for the issue in question, in return
for the continued efforts of that contributor. The number, obscurity,
and triviality of such preferences ends up confusing ordinary users
immensely, while everyone is penalized by the resulting bloat and
reduced thoroughness of testing."

This sounds exactly like us!  Go read the whole thing; it's short and
interesting.

-Lex