snip... With > the closed approach the developers (or vendors) have to take over 100% > responsibility (because the end user has no way to interact with the > development), which usually makes things very formal and slow, where the > open approach relies very much on the end users reporting problems. In > most active projects these are fixed really quickly, giving both the > developers and the end users a warm fuzzy feeling ;-) I think this says it all and is my core point too really. There's a lot to be said for feedback and interaction with your users that's often overlooked. All the ideas of complicated quality control processes in the world is not going to make a user feel as loved as seeing someone responding quickly to their bug and fixing it in a short space of time. With a proprietary process model, it goes in the big black box and then you sit and wait to see if it will ever come out again. Just look at the IcedTea bug tracker and you will see this -- lots of bugs waiting on responses from Sun. The sooner the bug process is opened up, the better. Labelling FOSS as > playground for bored developers is, uhm, strange. But yeah, now that > Classpath has lost most of its end users, we might end up like that ;-) > I don't care, I'll continue anyway. > Indeed. The idea is just too strange to even be worth arguing with -- there are plenty of examples of where its been beneficial other than to some warped developers that I need not go into here. > Cheers, Roman > -- > http://kennke.org/blog/ > > > Thanks, -- Andrew :-) Support Free Java! Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath http://openjdk.java.net
