Since interviewing the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, I've been thinking a little more about what he calls "opinionated software."
That handy little phrase seems to sum up what attracts me to a lot of technology, at all levels.
What I like
Free software--it's not really economics that drew me to free software, but the principles and aims. When you release or use free software, you're exercising your right to free speech and adding your voice to an argument.
Desktop environments--GNOME 2.0: The move from GNOME 1.0 to version 2.0 was highly opinionated (Mac users, think OS 9 to OS X). Complexity of user interface was thrown out in favour of sensible defaults.
Web standards--CSS, RDF, XHTML: not only is there a right way to do things, but it turns out to be better too! I don't automatically fall in love with everything that emerges from the W3C, but some things are so obviously the right way it's impossible not to love them--warts and all.
Muine music player--this player throws out the paraphernalia of iTunes clones and gets you close to the music. Queue, play. What I want to do.
Epiphany web browser--a simple text bar does for bookmark lookup, search and URLs. The bookmarks work like del.icio.us tags. Despite the lure of Firefox extensions, simplicity and efficiency keeps me with Epiphany.
Make friends and enemies
The thing about opinions is that people are inclined to disagree with them. Opinions won't please everybody and, being opinionated, you will never carry everybody with you.
But opinions give you something with which to scythe through indifference. In both my writing and software development work taking a particular stance enables me to create interest, and gives direction to my projects. I tend to get bored easily, and if I'm bored, then my readers and users will never make it.
Being opinionated in software development is easier when there's a strong leader, or it's a one-person project. It's more of a dilemma if you're running a free software project with multiple contributors.
Such projects need such contributions, but run a risk of losing focus and style. I think that there we need to be brave again. If being opinionated means losing potential users, it also means losing potential contributors.
Opinions help in dealing with users, too. It's obvious that the mere act of listening to users isn't good enough. They often won't say what they mean, or their requests mask a deeper issue. How often have you given your boss exactly what he asked for, to find it wasn't what he wanted? A combination of reading-between-the-lines and having opinions helps cut a way through the noise of user feedback.
Stirring the pot
Here are a few wishes for some free software projects that I want to see succeed further, but which really need to get opinionated to be effective. These projects aren't failing, but they're not reaching the potential I know is there.
Each of them are infrastructural in some way, and that's probably where the temptation to avoid being opinionated is strongest. But here's the genius: the rewards of being opinionated here are high. Ruby on Rails is the existence proof.
What's better? A handful of users with the "right" idea about how fundamentally important you are to everything, or loads of users who only see a portion of the capabilities of a project?
Copy the experts
It may seem like cheating to copy Apple's lead, but a lot of what they've done in OS X is to take a stand on what's useful and not. On many occasions this has inconvenienced people, but it's not eroded that special lure that Apple products hold. There's not harm in asking "What have Apple done?" with some of our projects.
Another poster-child for being opinionated is Ubuntu Linux. Technically, it's only marginally better than other Linux distributions. Strategically, it's miles ahead. Its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, had very solid opinions about where Ubuntu should go, and pursued them. Over time, these have pervaded the product itself, but at the start it was the message and the style that made the difference.
Opinions not expressed are rarely effective.
