Who said "Usability is Free"?

To many of us, the bestknown open source software (OSS) project is the Linux operating system, which has become wildly popular for being free and versatile. Linux also has a reputation for being challenging, at best, for nongeek users. Frankly, even a Linux distribution that claims to pay special attention to usability—such as Ubuntu—is still a challenge even for reasonably knowledgeable users like me, for instance. Managing updates, removing programs, disk partitioning, even finding my files are less than transparent processes. A few years back I was stunned to read an article on NewsForge, an online newspaper that focuses on Linux and Open Source, which acknowledged that maybe open source software just might have a usability problem. The author, Frans Englich, went on to declare that open source developers, having demonstrated their ability to solve any problem that they choose to tackle, could and should solve their usability problems on their own, without recourse to “outsiders [1].” Englich went on to query, while opining (or whining) that what little usability knowledge was available in the OSS community consisted of mere opinions and anecdotes: “But if I want to learn how to write phrases understandable by users or what colors to use that still allow color-blind people to