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Firefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19 releasedFirefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19 releasedPosted Dec 17, 2008 20:39 UTC (Wed) by PO8 (guest, #41661)In reply to: Firefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19 released by bucky Parent article: Firefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19 released
At the risk of feeding a troll...
We don't write to retail consumer goods manufacturers because in general there is very little chance that they will respond in any useful way. Since these goods tend to be highly interchangeable, brand switching is a reasonable alternative strategy. We do write bug reports for open source software packages because in general they have a history of fixing reported bugs. Since these packages tend to be minimally interchangeable, brand switching is not a reasonable alternative strategy.
Open source software is different enough from retail consumer goods to make most analogies between the two useless.
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Firefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19 released Posted Dec 17, 2008 23:32 UTC (Wed) by massysett (guest, #52736) [Link]
"We do write bug reports for open source software packages because in general they have a history of fixing reported bugs. Since these packages tend to be minimally interchangeable, brand switching is not a reasonable alternative strategy."
If this were true, there would not be so many examples of products that were forked because users and developers were not satisfied with the rate of development of a particular product. EGCS and XEmacs immediately spring to mind, and one could even put Firefox in this category. I can also think of projects that were started not as forks but solely because the author was thoroughly disgusted with an existing product--for example, the author of Getmail discusses many bugs that were not fixed in Fetchmail for years.
Furthermore, there often is interchangeability. There are lots of Vi clones (and different editors altogether), multiple desktop environments, different Web browsers, multiple music players.
I recently had a problem with a music player. I thought of bugreporting it, so I looked at the bug database. There were multiple bugs similar to the one I had reported. Many had never been dealt with; others were marked invalid. This is for a product that is not a hallmark of stability in the first place. I did not bugreport it. That would have been a waste of time. Instead I found another solution. My solution is not entirely comparable--I use multiple products where before I used just one--but it works just fine and is much more stable.
Obviously every project is different. But the comparisons to commercial products are entirely valid. Why should I continue using a product that has problems that are (at least for me) crippling, when I can go use another product that has fewer problems? I'm supposed to reward the sloppy project with bug reports, instead of using the project that has taken the time to code carefully so that there aren't so many bugs in the first place?
Free software bug reporting Posted Dec 21, 2008 22:51 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] We are talking about a Free software project here. Most probably you have not payed a dime to them but still you are using the product of their work. It is hard to see the analogy with commercial products that actively seek your money, when all you do is use their software for free.There are a lot of brands for peanut butter. There are also a lot of music players out there. But there are not so many alternatives for Firefox that we can discard it just for one (annoying but) little bug. Helping them with bug reporting -- or even better bug fixes -- is in the end helping us all.
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