On 12/11/05, Henrik Sundberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > To me this sounds like: > Just a few volunteers have contributed to OOo. > That is not many eyeballs. > Therefore "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is not valid for > OOo. > Therefore "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is something > between wildly misleading and utter crap. >
I'm slightly confused by what you've said here. I think that "eyeballs" refers to people looking at the program. OOo has *plenty* of eyeballs. According to the Stats page, Over 53 million sets of eyeballs. http://stats.openoffice.org/index.html The problem is, it's apparently not the eyeballs that matter, but the fingers at the keyboard - ie the number of contributing coders, not the number of bugfinders. Even then, I don't know how universally true that would hold, since there is a much older saying that "Too many cooks spoil the pot." (Refering to a cooking pot, not the drug.) In this case, it could be true that 6000 coders all with their own coding style, their own documentation habits, etc. could cause more harm than they fix. I don't know if that's true, but I could see it happening. One problem I've always seen with the idea of Open Source (as a development model) is a lack of direction. That's why you get a bunch of YA projects. The fact that YA is so widely used and known that the vast majority of people reading this list don't need me to translate is proof enough that the problem exists. In the case of OOo, their is a direction, I assume, but it's set by Sun Microsystems, and not the users. It's not a unique case, the direction is always choosen by the coders, not the users. But if the coders aren't paid, like they are with OOo (Sun's coders anyway), there's little motivation to make deadlines, meet goals, etc. I think the model (whether you want to call it Open Source, Free Software, Volunteer Coding, or whatever), that if you open it, the coders will come - is not universally true, not even usually true. Look at the number of pre-alpha and alpha projects on Source Forge that are no longer active. Personally, I think Sun's use of the Open Source license to promote good will with the "community" and to get at least some free code and QA for Star Office is very smart. But I think that is their goal - not to make OOo as great as possible, but to make Star Office successful and take down MSO, at least break up their marketshare somewhat. -- - Chad Smith http://www.gimpshop.net/ Because everyone loves free software!
