H
Heywood Jablowme
Flightless Bird
So why is OpenOffice so dire? The project claims more than 50m downloads of
the software, so let's assume that 50m people have tried it at least once.
More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by
open source's uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs
database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more
than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to
rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn't, and the number
of fixers certainly doesn't. Only about 500 people have signed the legalese
that would enable them to submit code to the project; since you need to do
this even to make changes to the website, that will translate to far fewer
than 500 volunteers submitting real code. A reasonable guess would be 50, or
even five.
Meanwhile, there are some simple, hugely irritating bugs that are four years
old. Two obvious ones: notes (or comments, as Word users call them) don't
have word wrap; and spaces typed at the end of a line won't show. It's not
many eyes making bugs shallow; more like many eyes making bugs invisible.
Most software has similar irritations. But complex open source projects seem
uniquely badly placed to fix them. They rely on a very small group of
programmers relative to the user base, and who have no direct incentive to
work on the bugs that are important to users.
the software, so let's assume that 50m people have tried it at least once.
More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by
open source's uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs
database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more
than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to
rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn't, and the number
of fixers certainly doesn't. Only about 500 people have signed the legalese
that would enable them to submit code to the project; since you need to do
this even to make changes to the website, that will translate to far fewer
than 500 volunteers submitting real code. A reasonable guess would be 50, or
even five.
Meanwhile, there are some simple, hugely irritating bugs that are four years
old. Two obvious ones: notes (or comments, as Word users call them) don't
have word wrap; and spaces typed at the end of a line won't show. It's not
many eyes making bugs shallow; more like many eyes making bugs invisible.
Most software has similar irritations. But complex open source projects seem
uniquely badly placed to fix them. They rely on a very small group of
programmers relative to the user base, and who have no direct incentive to
work on the bugs that are important to users.
