If this suite&#8217;s a success, why is it so buggy?
<p>This is my response to <a href='http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1660763,00.html'>If<br />
this suite&#8217;s a success, why is it so buggy?</a> by Andrew Brown of<br />
<cite>The Guardian</cite>.</p>
<p><span id="more-239"></span></p>
<p>Andrew Brown claims that OpenOffice &#8220;illustrates the limitations of<br />
open source&#8221; and establishes that my aphorism &#8220;Many eyes make bugs shallow&#8221; is<br />
false, but his reasoning is shaky.</p>
<p>Mr Brown appears to be arguing that because open-source development isn&#8217;t<br />
perfect, it isn&#8217;t any better than closed source.  But there is no<br />
silver bullet for the problem of software complexity &#8212; <em>all</em><br />
programs, open or closed, will have bugs.  The figures he is waving<br />
around (6K bugs, 5K feature requests) are meaningless in isolation.</p>
<p>In fact, controlled comparisons between closed- and open-source<br />
versions of functionally equivalent programs have been done.  Barton<br />
Miller&#8217;s well-known &#8220;Fuzz Papers&#8221; suggested that open source programs<br />
to have a 39% edge in reliability over closed-source equivalents.</p>
<p>So where are the comparative statistics for the bug load of Microsoft<br />
Office?  Do we know that it has fewer than 11,000 bugs and feature<br />
requests outstanding?  If Mr. Brown don&#8217;t know that, or at least have<br />
those figures for a closed-source program of comparable size to<br />
OpenOffice, he has no basis for asserting that the open-source method<br />
is failing.</p>
<p>His article does inadvertently illustrate an important point, however.<br />
If you make legal paperwork a requirement before volunteers can<br />
contribute to a project, very few will do so.  If OpenOffice is<br />
failing its promise, it&#8217;s not because &#8220;many eyeballs&#8221; doesn&#8217;t work &mdash;<br />
it&#8217;s because bureaucratic obstacles are driving the eyeballs away.</p>
