ORIGINAL ARTICLE Users ’ perception of open source usability: an empirical study

users has increased in recent years. No longer are they limited to technically adept software developers. Many believe that the OSS market share could increase tremen-dously provided OSS had systems that were easier to use. Although examples of good usable open source software exist, it is agreed that OSS can be made more usable. This study presents an empirical investigation to study the impact of some key factors on OSS usability from the end users ’ point of view. The research model studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability fac-tors from the users ’ perspective and OSS usability. A data set of 102 OSS users from 13 open source projects of various sizes was used to study the research model. The results of this study provide empirical evidence by indi-cating that the highlighted key factors play a significant role in improving OSS usability