[TriLUG] Here's an idea to make it easier to fix a Linux OS!!

[Brent Fox]

On Friday 02 November 2001 03:02 am, al johson wrote:
>    P.S. I'll bet Microsoft would never air their software mistakes in
> public!! And the open source community doing so (as they already do) adds
> even more prestige over Microsoft who invariably always hides their
> problems and ignores security holes discovered by others and reported to
> them. =====================

I totally agree with you here.  There are lots of bug tracking sites for 
various open source projects...Mozilla, Red Hat, and Mandrake all run 
Bugzilla.  I think Gnome and KDE have different bug trackers.  But the point 
is, the only way to get good software is to acknowledge the problems and then 
fix them.  I have never seen a proprietary software company be as honest with 
their users as OSS developers are with theirs.  

But you can't really blame them for being closed...being open is hard.  For 
two years, the Mozilla developers heard nothing but "It's too slow", "It 
crashed on me, no I didn't file a bug report", "The Mozilla project has 
failed", and on and on.  But they acknowledged the problems and kept working. 
 They had to trash the Netscape code base and start from scratch, for Pete's 
sake.  I'm glad they did because Mozilla is pretty nice now.  The problem is 
that every big project, whether it is open or closed, starts off with early 
stability problems because it is under such rapid flux.  In a closed source 
environment, outsiders don't get to see it in this state.  That makes it easy 
on the programmer, but it also gives him/her the ability to cut corners that 
no one will ever see.  The OSS developer doesn't have this luxury.

Cheers,
   Brent