How good open-source user interfaces get made

How is it that a company like Apple can produce wonderful user interfaces, but open-source UIs are generally, well, substandard? Matthew Thomas suggested back in 2002 that too many cooks can spoil the broth:

Every contributor to the [open-source] project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.

The solution? According to Matt Asay, the key is to get a commercial company involved. He's seen an upcoming release of Ubuntu from Canonical, Ltd. that may rival MacOS for usability. He says:

You need a little more than open source, it seems, to make products usable. You need control, and control doesn't always jibe well with open-source development. This is one reason that we're seeing the emergence of the Open Core licensing model for open source.

The Open Road: The cathedral plus the bazaar: Open source and Apple (design) envy