13 Apr
2011
13 Apr
'11
9:01 a.m.
In article <alpine.LFD.2.00.1104130604430.10966 at grumble.deltasoft.com>,
Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> writes:
Just because you and your colleagues aren't doing this, doesn't
necessarily mean it doesn't happen. It just means it doesn't happen
within your particular theatre of operations. :)
I'm all for open source, but for serious bugs beyond a simple
one-liner fix (which I have contributed on a number of occasions)
its unlikely that anyone but the owners/maintainers of an open source
package are going to fix it.
Just because you could, in theory, fix the bug with the source doesn't
say anything about the probability of that actually happening. With
larger code bases and more serious bugs, I'm willing to guess that the
probability is effectively zero for most users. I think the open
source advocates make too much of this and in practice, unless you are
a member of the team that works on that open source project, I don't
think it happens as much as advocates like to believe.
If you want to make the claim that it does happen with regularity,
show me some data to prove your claim.
--
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On Tue, 12 Apr 2011, Richard wrote:
*Most* open source code has crap quality. If you don't believe me,
then start browsing a statistical sample of stuff on any of the major
open source hosting sites like sourceforge, etc. Don't browse by
what's most popular or what's most downloaded, because that will focus
you on only the stuff that's actually used and maintained, which is a
very small portion of all open source software projects.
There's nothing really different about open source here than it was
for ZIP files of source code in the BBS days. Most of that stuff was
crap too, at least from the perspective of reading/understanding/modifying
the code.
The idea of open source is not crap.
I'm essentially restating Sturgeon's Law as applied to open source
software. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law>
In article <alpine.LFD.2.00.1104122029350.25360 at grumble.deltasoft.com>,
Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> writes:
That was the thinly-veiled implication. You realize that you're interfering with his
"open source is crap!"
I never said open source is crap. If I thought that, why would I
recreate manx as an open source project?
If memory serves, manx is a
documentation repository isn't it?
Its a web application.
narrative by dragging out facts 'n stuff, right?
:)
While it may be a fact that you *could* fix open source software
that's buggy because you have access to the source files, the
likelihood of anyone besides the original author doing this is low for
most open source software.