Talking again about open source & personal point of view, NOT about
commercial software or products (such as Nokia device...).
If OSS doesn't view itself as professional as commercial stuff, then it's guaranteed to fail in the long run. Look at the success stories of OSS; Firefox, Apache, Linux, OOo, and so on. They aren't based around the bitterness of a developer in a basement.
Submitting a bugzilla report shouldn't take more than 10 minutes
10 minutes is a long time for something that may not help. Multiply that by
say 8-10 open source applications you are interested in, and you see why
it's not worth the effort.
10*10 minutes is still <2 hours. And you've then participated in
helping 10 different projects to (potentially) improve!
Who has 2 hours to waste on something as fun as bugzilla? Even this email exchange is way more rewarding. I've put in a handful for certain projects, then watch them sit around doing nothing, only to get an email that says "WONTFIX". That's user hostile.
It's fairly similar to Ubuntu apport I think? Ubuntu's lackinga difference). Have you ever got the "Report this error to Microsoft"
dialog box? That's what I'm talking about.
MS problem & solution database. Novell/SUSE has something similar
to that though I think.
However, those are distributions, not individual upstream projects
like's discussed here.
(Hm... Maybe maemo, as a basis for distribution could offer something here.)
NOW you're talking! I'm trying to promote the "many eyeballs" thing and not the "genius with a microscope" thing.
If you go to effort of reporting the bug and actually reply questions
on how the developers might be able to reproduce it, so that they
can start investigating how to fix it, that shows that you actually
care about the issue and that it's real.
So you say we have thousands of users per developer. Great! The user
should be able to email or whatever saying: xyz is crashing when I view the
records. It means almost nothing to the dev, but if he gets 999 others that
say exactly the same thing, it means the view records routine is horribly
broken.
Usually it means that users are using too old version of the SW
(e.g. because distro hasn't upgraded to latest version) and therefore
wasting developers time.Regardless of how important you may feel yourself :-), most Open Source
On the other hand, if he gets 5 others, and notices they're all
from non-latin alphabet countries, the dev is in the best position to put
those pieces together. The DEV can make a bugzilla record. Maybe in
Instead what usually happens is the instant any individual report comes in
the dev starts shouting about how the user should use bugzilla (yet another
application, another big learning curve, and yet another registration on the
net), expecting every user to be a developer or professional-grade QA tester
too.
That makes the triage for the user easy; 3) dump the program.
This is not about my own perceived importance, but the developer's. Is he really more valuable than thousands or hundreds of users?
developers really aren't doing what they do to please you or get more
users, but to solve the issues they have themselves or otherwise find
interesting/fun to solve. Having more users is nice only if they help
in that, otherwise they are just a drag. As it's possible that users at
some later point become contributors, and it's nice to hear that your
efforts are appreciated by others, Open Source developers are usually
nice for the users (if they behave reasonably).
Again, this is a very unprofessional way to develop. Self-defeating. Might as well keep it closed source at this point. And makes the platform unattractive to users and investors (I also mean investors of mindshare and time as well as money)
However, Open Source is about a community of people who want to improve
things *together*. If you just want to profit from their work without
contributing yourself in someway (even to some other project), well,
they're not going to miss you.
Do you say the same thing to developers? "If you don't want to respond to users' input, take a hike, we're not going to miss you".
The best experiences I've had with developers on maemo so far is on the ITT forums. It's simple to report, you can see results, and takes only seconds. One registration for many many applications, and it's something you might want to do in the long run anyway.
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