OpenOffice and The Guardian
I read the following article just now (using Firefox 1.5, which I ignored talking about, although they still haven't fixed the incredibly annoying and noticable bug where if a page load fails in a new tab you lose the URL forever), and I think it is quite well written: If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy? The Register has been going after Wikipedia, somewhat over-harshly, and has an article which links Wikipedia and OpenOffice in an interesting way, basically saying that individuals defending both while ignoring the obvious problems tend to show the same failures in their arguments, basically demontrating something that smart IT people have known all along - Open Source, by itself, means nothing. By that I mean that having access to the source code doesn't mean a thing - not a thing - to a large majority of users in most cases. For example, does not having Microsoft Office source code access mean anything to me? No, it does not. Even if I had that access, I would never use it. I have no hope of understanding that much source code cold.
This means that the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" argument is false. There's not any factual debate on this. The only people who understand these large code bases are the people who work directly on their portions of it. The folks writing Microsoft Excel have no idea how to understand the Microsoft Word source code any more than the Sheet source code. Any they work at the same company with the same coding practices:
Quoting from the article:
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.
This is a high unfixed bug count, I think, for a released version 2.0 product that is supposed to be commerical quality. I look at the Vista December CTP, and without giving away special inside information, the bug/wish list is currently under 40,000, for a product that is much, much larger than OpenOffice and is more than six months away. This count includes all of the duplicates, all of the closed issues, all of the pilot errors, all of the "by design" issues. In other words, less bugs than OpenOffice has had filed.
None of this means I'm against Open Source. I see it as a "right tool for the right job" - all of my customers will tell you that, and it's why we do have some Linux in production at Software Answers (not much, but some). But, it's gotten quite annoying to hear the same old incorrect arguments made trying to convince me that Open Source is inherently better. If that were true, Firefox wouldn't keep losing my URLs.