Fanatics and their illogic

[timwi]

In a newsgroup thread today, I heard (rather, read) an open-source fanatic complain about some minor shortcoming in a proprietary piece of software they are forced to use at work. This went something like,Bloody Microsoft! This stupid Outlook/Word/etc. can't even do XYZ!
The implicit claim, of course, being that their favourite open-source

Comments

[crschmidt]

Regardless of the particular shortcomings of Mozilla-related projects, the fact is that many of the loudest complaining users don't ever bother to report the bugs they find. The sentiment is true, regardless of the dozens of counter-examples you could point out.

Of the remaining group, the large majority don't actually report reproduction steps for a bug. So, I might be aware that there is an issue, but be unaware of how to fix it.

The only bug reports that are useful to me as a developer are those that allow me to cause the situation the user experienced to happen, or to have enough information about how they caused it to happen that I can determine the cause of the problem without reproducing it. In the former case, I fix it and add a regression test. In the latter case, I fix it in a branch and ask them to test it -- and after they do that, and report that I did fix their problem, it'll go into the main branch.

Very few people bother to do anything other than complain that.

[timwi]

the fact is that many of the loudest complaining users don't ever bother to report the bugs they find.

I don't contest that. It's perfectly understandable even: the "loudest" are usually the loudest because they are the most frustrated, and if they are frustrated they likely don't see much point in reporting individual bugs. And I don't blame them; bugs don't get fixed in any reasonable timeframe anyway, whether it's open-source or not, and the potential chance of seeing a fix years from now is very little motivation to most people. (That is not an exaggeration: some of the bugs I had reported for Firefox 1.0 have not been fixed in 1.5 but only in 2.0, which is a delay of 24 months. Within those two releases, new bugs have occurred, and now I have to wait for another 24 months for those to get fixed.)

Of the remaining group, the large majority don't actually report reproduction steps for a bug.Which, again, I don't contest, and I don't blame them: It is very hard for non-technical people to reproduce a problem. Most normal users may

[c_eagle]

eeeccch. the world seems to have an endless supply of groundless pontificators. ;P