Free as in free from frustration

How many small open source projects have a dedicated testing team, comparable in size to the available development horsepower? How many have a dedicated usability professional, or even integrate usability standards throughout the development process?

If you have limited time to spend on something you will not get paid for, you will pick the fun stuff. In the workplace fun, cool and kudos are not the sine qua non before programmers will do any work. Your paycheque is your motivation, as Alfred Hitchcock once said to an actor.

I attended a seminar once about Spring MVC, listening to two over-enthusiastic developers telling me how their platform was so much better than the 1356 Java web frameworks vying for my attention. First question from the audience: "When are you guys going to bring the documentation up to date?". I rest my case.

Although no documentation is often better than bad documentation I could possibly live without documentation, provided the software is so intuitive it doesn't need a manual. I can hear your ironic chuckles already.

I was dabbling with music notation software on Linux, installing the latest version of MuseScore.
It's an impressive piece of work, but it kept crashing. It's been around for a while, and yet it still manages to crash randomly. I was running the stable release, and yet it kept crashing on me. The crashes were inexplicable and completely non-reproduceable. One single keystroke was enough to let everything vanish.

I bet it doesn't crash that often on the developers' machines. I reckon there's a lot of satisfied users who don't uninstall the app out of sheer frustration. Why don't I file a bug report and help the developers fix this? Well, I consider some bugs too trivial to report and others - like this one - too glaring. I'm using the latest version of Ubuntu, installing it using the standard Synaptic package manager. As far as I'm concerned the problem is not my problem. Sure, there's likely some pesky bit of configuration to do with sound drivers, but statistically I have only forty more years left on this earth, and my time is too precious to bother.

Mac OS comes with Garageband. It has only a subset of all the nifty features that MuseScore offers. It's made for the amateur home studio, i.e. for me. It's so intuitive it doesn't need a manual. It's certainly not free, neither in freedom or in beer, but it came installed with the OS, so at least it feels free.

Best of all, it hasn't crashed on me yet.