{"id":239,"date":"2005-12-08T16:37:29","date_gmt":"2005-12-08T21:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=239"},"modified":"2005-12-08T18:08:46","modified_gmt":"2005-12-08T23:08:46","slug":"if-this-suites-a-success-why-is-it-so-buggy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=239","title":{"rendered":"If this suite&#8217;s a success, why is it so buggy?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is my response to <a href='http:\/\/technology.guardian.co.uk\/weekly\/story\/0,16376,1660763,00.html'>If<br \/>\nthis suite&#8217;s a success, why is it so buggy?<\/a> by Andrew Brown of<br \/>\n<cite>The Guardian<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Andrew Brown claims that OpenOffice &#8220;illustrates the limitations of<br \/>\nopen source&#8221; and establishes that my aphorism &#8220;Many eyes make bugs shallow&#8221; is<br \/>\nfalse, but his reasoning is shaky.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Brown appears to be arguing that because open-source development isn&#8217;t<br \/>\nperfect, it isn&#8217;t any better than closed source.  But there is no<br \/>\nsilver bullet for the problem of software complexity &#8212; <em>all<\/em><br \/>\nprograms, open or closed, will have bugs.  The figures he is waving<br \/>\naround (6K bugs, 5K feature requests) are meaningless in isolation.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, controlled comparisons between closed- and open-source<br \/>\nversions of functionally equivalent programs have been done.  Barton<br \/>\nMiller&#8217;s well-known &#8220;Fuzz Papers&#8221; suggested that open source programs<br \/>\nto have a 39% edge in reliability over closed-source equivalents.<\/p>\n<p>So where are the comparative statistics for the bug load of Microsoft<br \/>\nOffice?  Do we know that it has fewer than 11,000 bugs and feature<br \/>\nrequests outstanding?  If Mr. Brown don&#8217;t know that, or at least have<br \/>\nthose figures for a closed-source program of comparable size to<br \/>\nOpenOffice, he has no basis for asserting that the open-source method<br \/>\nis failing.<\/p>\n<p>His article does inadvertently illustrate an important point, however.<br \/>\nIf you make legal paperwork a requirement before volunteers can<br \/>\ncontribute to a project, very few will do so.  If OpenOffice is<br \/>\nfailing its promise, it&#8217;s not because &#8220;many eyeballs&#8221; doesn&#8217;t work &mdash;<br \/>\nit&#8217;s because bureaucratic obstacles are driving the eyeballs away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is my response to If this suite&#8217;s a success, why is it so buggy? by Andrew Brown of The Guardian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}