Article Idea:
Architecting the Free World: User Assistance in Open Source
suggested by Stephanie L. Trunzo on 2006/01/18
As an IA at IBM, I have been challenged by the complexities presented by a half-open source, half-proprietary development environment. community. IBM has been one of the leaders in the open source space for a while, notably with its Eclipse IDE project. Where code and function is flexible and adaptative, open source provides a nice playground. For user assistance that is best served up as context-rich, stripping the context away to provide reuable components is a difficult proposition. As well, is professional user assistance a value-add to a product, or is it something that should be given away free with open source code?
What are the best practices in delivering information in open source projects, and reusing that information in for-sale products? When multiple corporations (as well as any programmer in his basement at home) might be contributing to the same project, how do you handle incoming information that you didn’t anticipate in your product?
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Joe Sokohl
16 Reputation points
Posted 2006/01/27 @ 07:07AM with
“stripping the context away to provide reuable components is a difficult proposition”—hence the reason why I agree with Alan Cooper that reuse is (mostly) a bad idea, from a UX perspective.