[TriLUG] Fwd: Sign this Petition - Explain why taxpayers pay out billions to Microsoft and get nothing in return, while Linux is free!

[Brandon Van Every]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 8:40 PM, Randy Barlow
<randy at electronsweatshop.com>wrote:

> On Sat, 2013-04-27 at 18:55 -0400, Brandon Van Every wrote:
> > New
> > bugs are created because a lot of the open source world doesn't
> > believe in
> > stability or end user experience.
>
> There have actually been some studies that have revealed the opposite.
> Open source software on average has ~100 times fewer bugs per line of
> code than closed source software does:
>
>
I'd consider that possible for large, corporate funded open source projects.

I'm *not* prepared to believe that for the median Sourceforge project.  The
median number of contributors is 1 person.  I spend *a lot* of my time
trying to overcome people's broken builds.  I got really good at CMake and
really distracted from game development for several years because of this.
 Nowadays I have a much better benefit / cost drill for what I'm trying to
evaluate or get working.  Open source ain't rosy when you don't have
hundreds of bodies staring at the code, let alone lifting a finger to
actually file bugs.


>
> Open Source software projects are also often much more responsive to
> fixing bugs (especially high profile security related bugs) than most
> closed source projects.
>
>
That I agree with, in my experience.  If the developers are alive and
kicking, they will often take patches, and often throw them pretty quickly
into their source pool.  I think the proliferation of Mercurial and Git has
greatly facilitated this.


Cheers,
Brandon