On Bugzilla and spreading FOSS, was: Where Fedora Went Wrong...

[M. Fioretti]

On Thu, May 17, 2007 23:11:10 PM +0200, Matej Cepl (mcepl at redhat.com)
wrote:

> I think we have to admit, that just there will be bigger and 
> bigger share of users of Linux who are absolutely unable to file 
> a proper bug report.

Yes, this is one thing that, as a whole, the current FOSS community
still hasn't realized. What I referred to, both in the post here and
in the link I provided, however, is a slightly different thing: I am
not just saying that 90% of people are unable to program (which is
true) so we'd better cope with this fact.

What is wrong is to expect that the "Freely you have received, freely
give" behavior happens within *every* single tool, community or
"service" that one uses, instead than in one's whole life.

In other words, it makes no sense to conclude that if Bob uses Fedora
but never contributes to *it*, Bob is freely receiving but not freely
giving. Like it or not, this is still the first, unconscious gut
feeling of many FOSS veterans.

But what do we know about Bob in real life? Bob may be already freely
giving all his spare time and money to fight drugs, world hunger,
whatever. Demanding that he reduces those efforts to fix a software
bug would be ridiculous, he would have every right to say "this is
broken, somebody _else_ please fix it". Even if he _were_ a competent
programmer.

In any case, this was and is a side issue now, I'd rather continuing
discussing the fture after bugzilla, if there is anything else to
discuss on that right now.

	Marco

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