Mosfet has a rebuttal of Havoc Pennington's Free software UI article. It doesn't seem to be very well thought out, or even proof-read. For example Mosfet says it's important not to discount features and "snazzy graphics", but Havoc never once made any such suggestion - it is the over-reliance that is the problem. He purposefully mis-interprets Havoc's re-working of mpt's points and then attempts to prove that KDE hasn't fallen prey to them.

I'm not sure whether it was accidental that Mosfet mis-interpreted the bullet "Maintainers cave in and add lame preferences rather than endure flamewars.". His response to this is that "it always helps to listen to what the users say when implementing things". Who on earth isn't doing this ? The problem is when users are saying different things. What do you do ? Add a million preferences to satisfy every vocal user, or just stick with some sensible decision ? It's important to remember that the vocal user population is not a representative minority. This is the central point that Mosfet really does not get.

I don't think he understood what Havoc meant by "auto-generate" either. How exactly is Qt Designer automatic ? It's clearly not - it would be called Qt Automator otherwise ;) He doesn't seem to get the difference between configuration and preferences. Speaking of the latter, I wonder why he hasn't dealt with the point that the difficulty of a decent organisation of preferences is a factor of the number of preferences.

He has an unfortunate habit of directly contradicting himself too, which makes his points a little confused :

" Havoc states:

"The traditional, de facto free software line between when a preference should exist and when it shouldn't is "a preference should exist if someone implements it or asks for it." No one is going to seriously defend this one

I can and will! ... yes as a developer you do have to draw a line about what your application should or should not do "