good point about web design as based on FLOSS!

The open source revolution has done nothing to change the fact that the best-designed, most-intuitive user interfaces are found in closed-source commercial software.

I got to say, what nonsense. As a very happy Ubuntu/gnome user, and before that of Debian and xfce, I use a beautiful, user-friendly, reliable, competent free os, applications, and programmes every day, for web development and other work.

As for the web, consider the enormous success of open source software like the web browser Firefox, the Drupal CMS, the WordPress blogging platform that this blog, and the majority of blogs on the web, is running on, not to speak of popular widely used frameworks PHPCake, Symphony, Codeigniter, etc, and, of course, the now nearly ubiquitous jquery library (think of ajax, lightboxes, many forms and menus, styling, typography, and so on). The list goes on…For developers/designers and end-users, the web is indeed running, and running happily, beautifully, on open source software.

Certainly the discipline of user-experience design is making leaps and bounds that we are all benefiting from; the real story of the web however directly contradicts this article; web design and web user-interfaces are so very good because most web applications, technologies, languages etc., that is, everything from (x)html, css, js, and xml to image galleries to distributed streams computing platforms are open source and free to download. The front end of the web, the user-experience side of the web, apparently unstoppable in ingenuity and brilliance, has been built from early days using free open source licenced software, web standards, and dedicated communities from the web standards and open source movements.

I really appreciate much of p2p’s offerings, but here too much libertarian ideology mixed up with daringfireball Apple propaganda is raising some objection.

I don’t think the problem is solely “structural” as argued by John Gruber. A huge amount of F/LOSS development happens by way of sponsorship through companies (example: IBM). If those companies chose to fund the development of user interfaces, you’d see that (as with Canonical and Ubuntu).

The biggest problems have been a lack of libraries that makes creating really nice interfaces very easy. In web applications, we see this problem disappearing with html and css, and jquery.

Probably the biggest problem of all is a lack of literacy of design: people cannot design good interfaces if they do not have sound interface design approaches and knowledge. There is definitely an under-appreciation in all sectors towards what it takes to create a really well designed *anything* (interface or otherwise). Still, people who possess literacies of design *could* collaborate on designing really good interfaces.