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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Open source vs Closed source... What makes Open Source tick.
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () kde ! org>
Date:       2009-07-30 18:36:17
Message-ID: 200907301236.21271.aseigo () kde ! org
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On Thursday 30 July 2009, viwe lolwane wrote:
> I think he did not, maybe he did the point I m making here is how can you
> be sure that a project will be a winner.

you need to define what "winner" mean. you seem to be defining it in terms of 
"# of users" or "popularity". 

however, there are many different ways people find "wins": how interesting is 
the problem to solve? do they need the tool themselves? (self interested 
development vs development for others) do they believe that in the future it 
will be popular? do they have a small band of friends who work on it together, 
creating a small (so "non-pupular") but self-sustaining community around it? 
have they found someone to pay them to work on it? etc..

> never tested the code. Microsoft must have thousands of testers to perform
> inspections and walkthrough and correctness
> proving. One might never be sure that the product is 100% without defects,
> but microsoft OS must be closer to that.

you're making an assumption here about # of testers -> # of defects. while at 
some level there's an "obvious" set of statements, such as: if there are no 
testers, defects will go unnoticed; but beyond those boundary conditions it 
gets very grey:

does testing result in fixes being made?
how many testers per how many lines of code? relative to the number of 
products?
how much automated testing goes on? what value is brought there?

and finally: is it the # of defects that matters in the real world in terms of 
usage and adoption? i don't think it is. Microsoft OSes have received great 
uptake with much higher rates of defects that their competitors.

> How many testers does KDE have? the numbers speak for themselves, how can
> you be certain that your application/SDK is without defects

we can't; in fact, we know it has defects. we have an open bug tracker 
documenting that. 

we absolutely have room to improve when it comes to detecting and fixing 
defects in our software. but we're not actually running a race for perfection 
here, the goal is to enjoy creating free software for us and others to use. 
fixing defects is a means to that end. so are we achieving those goals? both 
our user base and our contributor base continues to grow.

> or is better that Microsoft OS? thats a question.

"better than" is highly subjective. you'll need to give concrete measures by 
which to answer that.

we already offer something that is fairer, more open and more sustainable.
we already offer something that is lower cost.
we already offer something that others can get involved directly with.
we already offer something that has features other OSes don't have.
we already have shown that we are more agile that most proprietary models.
we already offer something that is good enough for millions of users right 
now, evidenced by their usage of it.

and have you, btw, tried to have this same conversation on the Microsoft 
developer's mailing list? ;)

so ... how does one measure "better than"? your questions are very 
philosophical at times, and at other times speak more to human psychology than 
technology matters. those are much harder to pin down specifically, something 
you may want to keep in mind when writing your piece.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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