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0 pointsageitgey4mo ago0 comments

> The problem is that everyone wants a different 20% of the functionality.

I'm not disagreeing with your basic take, but I think this part is a little more subtle.

I'd argue that 80% of users (by raw user count) do want roughly the same 20% of functionality, most of the time.

The problem in FOSS is that average user in the FOSS ecosystem is not remotely close to the profile of that 80%. The average FOSS user is part of the 1% of power users. They actively want something different and don't even understand the mindset of the other 80% of users.

When someone comes along to a FOSS project and honestly tries to rebuild it for the 80% of users, they often end up getting a lot of hate from the established FOSS community because they just have totally different needs. It's like they don't even speak the same language.

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bryanlarsen4mo ago

There's a good report/study about the complexity of Microsoft Word floating around somewhere.

It was something like:

- almost everybody only uses about 20% of the features of Word

- everybody's 20% is different, but

- ~80% of the 20% is common to most users.

- on the other hand, the remaining 20% of the 20% is widely distributed and covers basically all of the product.

So if you made a version of Word with 16% of its feature set you would almost make everybody happy. But really, nobody would be happy. There's no small feature set that makes most people happy.

uticus4mo ago

Yeah but MS Word is also designed with the guidance of an army of accountants and corporate shareholders. Your study plays into that, but there's a much bigger picture when you talk about analyzing how any product came to be that has MS as a prefix.

ashtakeaway4mo ago

Kind of like how the author likely knows about the report and wanted to make a blog post about it without saying anything about or citing the report itself. IT seems like it but 80/20 can be found in lots of places, just like 60/40 can.

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