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