> The rest of it flowed from that, and I believe there's still a
> significant amount of support for this viewpoint: for many people, the
> most significant thing that Open Source gives them is the ability to
> download the code and make their change directly.
>
> It has been, as shag points out, a dismal failure at this.
>
> If you and Ravi don't think it was a goal, then it's certainly better
> than, say, those of us who know that it was a strong motivating and
> rallying point: "Do it as Open Source, so that we can fix the bugs
> sooner" was certainly a big part of Mozilla and OpenOffice to name two
> huge examples.
We are writing about the same thing from different contexts. As primarily a user of Open Source, it has delivered me faster fixes to bugs because I have the control that I wrote about (and so do many others who also contribute bugfixes).
So I do not see it as a dismal failure - in fact, just the opposite!
But it seems shag and you are speaking in refutation to someone whose argument seemed to be "open source will make the problems in a poorly managed software development project magically vanish". Maybe I misunderstand the straw argument since I don't think anyone has made it here.
As an IT project manager, I would say the problems of delayed releases and long bug resolution are caused by a poorly managed project (no control of scope creep, ever-shifting customer requirements, unrealistic constraints on budget/time/resources, etc.) which certainly do not go away simply by using Open Source. This ought to be self-evident: developers on a proprietary software development project all have access to the source code, just like develoeprs on a FOSS project.
I've spent some time looking at this Chandler thing and I would call it a bad example since it seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
Matt
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Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of THHGTTG. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it", it said, "and good luck." It was cross-referenced to the entry concerning the size of the Universe and ways of coping with that.
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