If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy?

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

Of OpenOffice, Andrew Brown asks, If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy?:

Of all the myths that have grown up around open source software, perhaps the most pervasive is Eric Raymond’s aphorism that ‘Many eyes make bugs shallow’, suggesting that if lots of people can view a program’s source code, they will find and fix its errors more quickly than commercial products whose code is jealously guarded. The only problem with this is that it’s not true — certainly not in one of the flagship projects of open source, OpenOffice.

[...]

The myth of open source rests on two improbable assumptions. The first is that a significant proportion of users can fix bugs. That is true at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concept of open source was first formalised in the 1980s by Richard Stallman and others, and it is true in some of the geekier corners of the internet. But on programs intended for use by the non-programming public, it’s a very different story.

This is important because of the second crucial false assumption: that even if not all users can fix a bug, they can help find them. They can’t. Most users just think: “The computer isn’t doing what I want.”

[...]

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.

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Jim: I take your corrections. Someone should solve food at some point. Who is working on this?
Isegoria: Apparently his Grimmer than Hell collection includes the Lacey stories.
Szopen: Reminds me of the story of Dr. Witaszek who during WW2 tried to use typhus on Nazis. He was captured, tortured and executed. Children were sent to German families in order to be Germanized (recovered by red cross fortunately) and wife was sent to Auschwitz.
Bruce: David Drake’s Lacey and His Friends assumes the output will go to oligarchs.
Felix: The Transparent Society by David Brin, if I recall, assumes there will always be Flockish cameras and the like. So, make their output public. Side note: Amazon’s “Customers also bought or read” for this book is quite the interesting reading list.
McChuck: Being seen in public is fine. But what Flock camera coverage does is effectively stalking.
Isegoria: I haven’t read In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir. Does the father come back to die under the son’s care?
Michael Lynch: Actually Junod did have that father and wrote a book about it.
Phileas Frogg: He combined gentle and meek kindness with implacable strength. A consummate Christian gentleman, and a better man than I.
Szopen: I was too young to ever read them, and in fact I only learned about them after the fall of Communism. I was only 13 when the first semi-free elections were held. I mostly remember hearing old jokes with my parents laughing and explaining why it was funny — and then slowly they stopped laughing.
Bruce: Szopen, is that what happened to Krokodil and Szpilki? Or were they too establishment?
Szopen: In Poland, a similar phenomenon appeared with respect to comedy: the quality of comedy shows fell in the first few years, because previously a lot of comedy was based on innuendos and clever allusions, hinting on something which people supposed not to know or were not supposed to think or say. Once those things could be said in the open, comedians kept depending on old tricks and it was just not fun anymore.
Gaikokumaniakku: When East Asians ask me whence come my antiquated notions of the USA, I read selections from the first Little House book to them. The dear, sweet, sympathetic little girl hopes that her father will bring back a dead bear, because she loves to eat bear meat.
Isegoria: No, xanthan gum isn’t anti-microbial. Natamycin is an anti-fungal commonly used in products such as cream cheeses, cottage cheese, sour cream, yogurt, shredded cheeses, cheese slices, and packaged salad mixes. Nisin is a polycyclic antibacterial peptide produced by the bacterium Lactococcus lactis that is used in processed cheese, meats, beverages, etc. during production to extend shelf life by suppressing Gram-positive spoilage and pathogenic bacteria.
Jim: Isn’t xanthan gum used as an antibiotic agent, especially in dairy products, or am I thinking of something else?
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Jim: Biotech is arguably AI’s most promising application.
Jim: James James: Granted, the Great Halfrican Uprising Media Spectacle presumably was astroturfed with real money—to the extent that the banks’ circulating credits can be described either as “real” or as “money”—which must then have found its way into the pockets of real people.
Jim: *A media spectacle involving Halfricans somehow, or a different media spectacle involving a rabble of white people wandering the premises of the so-called “People’s House”, one would not.
James James: Black Lives Matter may have been fleeting, but for the people who stole millions of dollars and bought multiple houses, the consequences were not fleeting. These short-term movements could also be conceptualized as temporary astroturf fronts for permanent political machines.

Isegoria

If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy?

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