Philip Chee <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/08/2013 17:59, Trane Francks wrote: >> On 8/11/13 5:54 PM +0900, Rob wrote: >> >> <much snippage of good stuff> >> >>> I think it is a big pity. It all worked so well in the past, I have >>> happily used this software since 1996 or so and at work we used it >>> since 2001. However, it all is coming to an end. >> >> Yeah, I've used the Suite since Communicator was first released in 1997. >> A lot of history over 3 different operating systems .... Unfortunately, >> I do find myself having to agree that the suite is in a state of decline >> at the moment. And it leaves me feeling unhappy. >> >> One of the other users in the mozilla groups suggested that the mandate >> of open source software is to serve the users. Alas, the reality is that >> open source software developers scratch their own itch. They are not >> beholden to anybody, and that seems to have resulted in some directions >> being chosen that are strictly at odds with what a segment of users >> would want to see. >> >> It will be interesting to see where it all ends up. >> >> trane > > We once ran a trial offering a bug bounty for fixing some long standing > issues. The result was ... crickets .... > > Conclusion: money doesn't motivate open source volunteers - or at least > the amount of money we were offering. > > Phil
That doesn's surprise me. The bar for entering such a project as a new volunteer, even when experienced in programming, is quite high. I have unpacked the source tree before, and it takes a long time to even locate the place where some functionality is actually executed. When the fix is more than fixing a text typo, it is quite difficult to judge if a fix will break something else. And even when one would be able to find a fix, it would be another big hurdle to get it accepted into the main version. Some fixes I have seen in bugs that reported issues that I encountered have been sitting there waiting for years. I can understand why not many would embark on such an adventure, even for money. _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
