Open sourcing genealogy for Linux first? Bad move

I was super-interested to hear about GRAMPS, an open-source genealogy program. I'm big into genealogy and, as I've argued before, I believe genealogy to be perfectly suited to open source.

But then I read this about GRAMPS, and lost hope:

GRAMPS is available for Linux, Windows, OSX, BSD, and Solaris, but the Linux versions are generally the most up-to-date.

In other words, GRAMPS has no chance of succeeding as a mainstream open-source project because it is skimping on the primary genealogy market: Windows.

Much of the world's genealogy is done by the older generation, a generation that isn't likely to have Linux running on their home desktop. While my grandma can run Linux, she and her crowd simply aren't going to be the ones to find and install GRAMPS.

Yes, Linux users can enjoy genealogy, too, and need not be using the same Personal Ancestry File that much of the genealogy world uses. But that's not the point.

The point is that the world would be better off having a common, open platform upon which Windows, Linux, and Mac users were both building and doing research. By privileging the least likely platform for mainstream users (i.e., those that do most of the genealogy), GRAMPS is locking itself out of its best chance to build a system that suits their needs. Much as I dislike Windows, it should be the first platform that GRAMPS supports, not Linux.

Developers will go where the users are. Genealogy users are not on Linux.

[all-usernames-in-use]

GRAMPS works for Windows. Most Windows users won't be looking for the most cutting edge version; they want what works. Also, open source projects, especially those run as hobby projects, do not need to measure success by the number of users they have. This is a carryover from the proprietary software world. Often the success is measured by number of new developers per time period or number of developer commits. Mark Shuttleworth blogged about this some time ago.

[davemc]

Displacing the leader in the industry will be difficult.

[t8]

Weblications are better than any program written for an OS. They work on all platforms because they are delivered to a browser and processed on the server.

[Imalittleteapot]

Yes, but they work crappily with crappily slow UI response. I really hate to say that though. They will continue to get better with AJAX, new browser extensions, new plugins, and new ways of doing things. Still, right now most web apps work crappily. Sorry I had to invent a new word because most weblications are somewhere in between crap and awesome right now.

[TransDutch]

Weblications for genealogy have the issue that many genealogists want to keep their data private - on their own computer - rather than on some website's server.

[prokoudine]

Much of the world's genealogy is done by the older generation, a generation that isn't likely to have Linux running on their home desktop.

I'm terribly sorry, but this is a quite insightless point of view.

http://blog.gramps-project.org/?p=39