Never mind that some of the linked projects are tackling problems orders of magnitude more difficult and hairy than some commenters here will even fathom undertaking in their 'careers.'

If I just look at myself as someone who's been using OSS for years, and absolutely depends on tools like gcc for my day-to-day work, even despite all that I still sometimes find myself discarding certain OSS software solutions I have no prior experience with, for nothing else but a crappy amateurish logo or an ugly website. I know it doesn't say anything about how good the software is, but somehow it's an instinctive reaction, which I think is pretty universal among humans.

In a broader sense, if you look at some of the reactions this article seems to trigger, I think you can safely see that tunnel-vision and a complete disregard of the differences between OSS developers and potential OSS users is a huge missed opportunity. You can be confident in the quality, complexity and utility of a piece of software whatever you like, but that doesn't 'sell' it to end-users.

If OSS wants broader acceptence and ever become a real-alternative to commercial software it needs superficial polish and marketing. This may not be relevant for compilers or debuggers, but it is relevant for tools facing non-developer end-users.

I completely agree that the GNU projects are very useful. That said, no matter how useful and valuable a product is, all that value is simply lost if no one uses it. Making these projects more attractive to people not already familiar with them will help them to flourish the way that they should.

More often then not overly flashy websites seem to look bad on my book. To me it seems more like they are trying to slip something under the rug while simple designs come across as more focused. Like http://prgmr.com http://tarsnap.com and http://nearlyfreespeech.net .

https://web.archive.org/web/19991117022152/http://slackware....

It does, if you want it or not. A project that is not being marketed will not be successful. If you are suggesting that GNU has no marketing you're wrong. GNU might have marketing not everybody agrees with, but it has a lot of it.

The homepage of vim, the editor every hipster who wants to look like a Unix greybeard tries to learn as if it were the holy grail of programming knowledge, has a very 1990s look. It also has more users than a lot of startup-published tools that claim to revolutionize how you do X.

There's no bootstrap landing page shit, no ads and no pitches. It finds users by word of mouth but there's very little actual advocating and no intentional conversion effort so as to deserve the word "marketing". No one tries to sell you vim, or make you open an account with it or anything else.

Same with emacs, autogen and emms and whatever.

But that's often not how people perceive vim these days because other channels have started filling the void. Vim's marketing these days is people referring the editor to others and letting them know how cool it can be.

Just because the original developer does not do marketing does not mean that other people won't fill the void. I for instance have been using vim for years and years and I'm very commonly showing off my vim setup to others at conferences and sharing my configuration online, tweeting screenshots etc.

Exactly. It's just a different type of marketing from the Bootstrap-powered, coffee-house-backdrop intro video with indie guitar: "Hi! My name's Rob! Sometimes, I need to cross-compile to an embedded..."

not sure the intent really is to make fun of people. I read it as (light) criticism, which isn't the same thing, and which should be allowed by all means preferrably without people getting all politically correct about it. Imo.

Apart from that: I'm no designer but some of these logos look hideous to me. Though I also think some of them are just meant to be like that, as a f*k you statement: "it's about the content, not about the logo". Which is prefectly understandable: ever had to come up with a decent original logo? That can take days which could as well be spent programing for instance.

Yes, don't under-estimate the time-cost of this for non-designers. I tried it once. The design sucked, I got advice and got totally lost in a 3 day tour of typography and colour theory.

In the end I think it looked ok but it was a lot of effort for apparently 'not much' output.

However as others have pointed out this kind-of presentation IS important and totally worth it.

> It's not as if they needed to market them.

I disagree, IMO a wider userbase is usually a good thing for GNU/Open Source projects, for the community, and for the software/services industry as a whole.

>Yesterday there was this thread about the "three = 1" in the linux kernel source code,

Yes, and that thread generated a reasonable discussion about programming. How is that a bad thing? Do you think someone will stop using ext4 or Linux because of a questionable variable name in a rarely used bit of filesystem code?

You can look at this way instead: The focus is on good code, not nice logos which fits the Linux image well.

I'm indebted to the amount of amazing tools available by GNU and can't imagine how much they've contributed to the growth of numerous lean startups. Not all open source contributors are great designers and they mostly do this in their spare time.

Any open source project will help more people if it has a friendly face: well-documented code, nice logo, well-written articles explaining motivation behind technical decisions and so on. All of this contributes to the project's overall utility.

Add a startup-like website to the GNU binutils project and it's going to look pretty dumb to the no-nonsense crowd that needs assemblers. A "nice website" website is not going to extend the appeal of cross-assembling ARM microcontroller code on a x86-64 one bit.

> If you don't like them I'm sure most of those project would welcome a new design.

Funny you should mention that, I literally did this - once. Wanted to improve the landing page for an open source project and improve the logo. The maintainers wouldn't have any of it. In their eyes the project was fine the way it is.

And this isn't just one project. I bet if I were to go to cgraph with a better logo they would reject it. Open source folks are stubborn as a donkey 90% of the time.

Complaining about `three = 1` was a complete miss though.