On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 19:03, Rick Welykochy wrote: > <http://plus.maths.org/issue25/news/programs/index.html> > > "Open wide... > > The open source community may now have more than ideology on their side, > with researchers showing mathematically that their "release early, release often" > software development model is the quickest way to bug-free code. > > ... > > In a paper <http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0306511> currently being refereed, > Damien Challet and Yann Le Du from the University of Oxford characterised open > source software as that developed in the bazaar style, and closed source as that > created with the cathedral approach. They developed a mathematical model of how > bugs, or errors in the software, are detected and resolved for the two types of > software development."
Some thoughts, without disagreeing with the study. a) OpenSource is becoming more prevalent. This means that there are a lot more open source projects competing for the time of programmers. b) In turn there are more programmers working on open source, however the quality must be going down as more of the "average" programmers join the fray. Kind of destroys the "quality programmer" theory. The final comment on the article is that it misses the distance from bug introduction to bug notification, this time is very short. For gcc I was able to identify the problem within 2 weeks and it was therefore easy to locate the ultimate source of the problem in all the changes, imagine the proposed 18 month star office update cycle. (Mind you the more important outcome was an 8 line test program that ensures that my particular bug never haunts gcc again, extreme programming anyone.) -- Thanks KenF OpenOffice.org developer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
