I’ve seen a project take this path before, but project was Mozilla Firefox. The Firefox devs suddenly turned their back on their userbase in favor of catering to a wider audience. As a result, I – an obsessively dedicated Firefox user since at least Phoenix 0.2 – have sworn off the software completely.

Enter the “equal accessibility paradox.” I see this often with software projects especially, but it exists in all sorts of arenas, from websites to cell phones, cameras to iPods, from cars to TVs, even in restaurants and stores. The problem exists as such: you have two distinct groups of customers, one who prefers additional options or features even if it introduces complexity; and another, possibly larger, audience who prefers elegant simplicity at the expense of features. The goal is to provide everyone with the options and abilities they expect without overwhelming them. Can a new, non-savvy user control the product to do what they want equally as well as an advanced user can configure the product to do what he wants?

The problem comes from the fact that all too often, like with both Ubuntu and Firefox, you begin to favor one community over the other. I believe the Mozilla Foundation, at least in the provided example, unfortunately decided to cater to a wider audience by making decisions at the expense of its current users. They have made decisions that have cost them at least one user. Ubuntu, if the article is to be believed, has provided plenty of advanced options but over-simplified the non-advanced procedures. In short, if you aren’t a complete novice, you’re an expert. Thus the paradox takes shape: the gap between your two user groups becomes greater. Hopefully, along the way, you don’t so aggravate your most vigilant supporters so that they abandon you.

I’m positive I haven’t best expressed what I intended to say, but I think there’s a theory in there. As your userbase grows, the gap between your two user-types widens, and your target generally becomes one or the other.

As Apple grows and branches out from the Macintosh computer line, I can only hope they don’t cater to new users to a degree that forsakes the current users who kept them afloat for so long. As Microsoft has grown, they have taken more and more steps to frustrate the people who best support their products, so much so that my business now uses Linux on web servers and PHP for programming and I always recommend Macs and Linux to my friends and colleagues. As Firefox grew, I felt they left users like me behind. As Ubuntu grows, I hope they can control the divide before they find themselves head-to-head with the “equal accessibility paradox.”

The first report was that things are going great. They’ve got everything figured out and running, they even saw that it had a firewall, but, they asked, it has no antivirus! Do they need antivirus, they wanted to know.

I explained to them that there was antivirus protection programs available, but that right now, due to the nature of Linux, it really wasn’t necessary. I explained that they should be careful of running things with which they are unfamiliar, but that viruses were unlikely to be a problem. It took some convincing.

The mother was hooked on games. They were psyched to have new games besides Freecell and Solitaire, and she enjoyed the abundance of games on the default install.

They were unable to get their video camera to work. They told me the disk that came with it didn’t work. I explained that the driver and software was for Windows, and that the camera probably worked fine. “But,” I asked, “which program were you using it with?” Blank. “Well,” I continued, “what are you trying to do?” Blank. They hadn’t really considered why they needed or wanted the camera. It just was there. We’ll revisit that with them later.

Their internet experience was complete. They got Flash installed. They got MP3s working. They understood Firefox. They were also able to get their digital camera synced.

So far, the experiment is going very well.

So I told him the truth – I didn’t have a copy of Windows XP I could legally give him (in truth, I don’t even have a copy of Windows XP I could illegally give him since we are PC free). I told him, if he was feeling adventurous, I could give him an operating system that had tons of programs, would likely work with no additional drivers, and was completely free and legal. So he took it. I burned him Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. I told him to give the installation a shot, walk through and read everything carefully, and see what happens. If he needed help, I’d visit the next night.

But I didn’t hear from him the next day. So, Wednesday, I saw him pulling into his driveway and went out to talk to him.

Result? They successfully got Ubuntu running. They got Flash installed in Firefox. The programs that came with it were “totally sweet” and he was able to get everything figured out. It was online successfully, they had used OpenOffice.org, they had figured out Pidgin and his step-brother was in the process of backing up his files to put Ubuntu on his machine.

Maybe 2008 is the year of the Linux desktop and maybe not, but Linux is ready *now* for people who are ready for it.

Here’s a brief synopsis of the issue:

Awhile back, someone Mozilla said, “we had to change our name from Phoenix, and we had to change our name from Firebird, so dammit, this time, we’re going to trademark our name. So they did. And along with that trademark came some rules, which included restricting the use of the icon and the name. In other words – “if you modify our code, it’s no longer really ‘Firefox,’ so you can’t call it Firefox, and you can’t use the logo.”

Fair enough. If you download code, add a bunch of buggy crap that opens security holes, I’m sure the developer doesn’t want to you to distribute your product using (and potentially soiling) their name. So Mozilla says, “Feel free to distribute Firefox, but once you change it, it’s no longer Firefox.” And I get that. And I’m cool with it.

Debian, being the arrow straight guys that they are, said, “Whoa Nelly! Now that you’ve put some restrictions on our use, this isn’t free software. I can’t do what I want with it without limit.”

So Mozilla said “Ok, you can use the name Firefox.”

And Debian said, “But your logo’s trademark violates the Debian free software guidelines in our social contract.”

So Mozilla said, “Ok, fine, you get two choices: one, you but you can run all patches by us, so that we approve what is called ‘Firefox.’ Two, you can change the name of your project.”

Thus, after some whippersnapper came up with the awful pun IceWeasel (Fire/Ice, Fox/Weasel), even thought WaterWeasel would have maintained the alliterative name and been much better, they decided to add their own patches too. And the crappy thing is, I kinda like the patches.

So the question is – is it THAT important to be completely free? Is there anyone besides Richard Stallman and a few weird beards who are this passionate about using free software with a slightly restricted logo, restricted mainly so the project doesn’t find themselves in trouble later?

On top of this, they now will damage Firefox prevalence by adding yet ANOTHER browser to the mix.

Because this is a big issue! I see more and more open source projects having to get trademarks and restricting their use if this nonsense with IP law continues.

I tend to blame Debian here. I wish their rules weren’t so black and white. Sometimes computer users tend to be really overly critical and very matter of fact about things. The real world is gray. There are very few absolutes, and I usually find that people who think in absolutes are hard-headed, inflexible, and rarely fun to be around.

This reminds me of a podcast I recorded for OSNews. We are so preoccupied with fighting we rarely face the real issues. Debian can’t be bothered to rally hardware manufacturers for better Linux drivers, but rather, set their sights on taking down Mozilla, who has produced Buzilla, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Lightning, and Firefox. Makes sense… not.

IceWeasel is going to get a bunch of users right away. I think Ubuntu has considerably large userbase for popular Linux users, and IceWeasel sounds really cutting edge. On top of that, Firefox 2 was just released and it’s pretty underwhelming from a user standpoint. Other than close buttons on each tab, it’s barely different, and IceWeasel will boast some neat new features, which will interest people. I predict we’ll see it on Windows in the next few months too.

The question is – is this the best use of our time??

If I’ve gotten any of this wrong or misunderstood any of this story, feel free to post any corrections or notations in the comments and I will gladly update this piece.