Re:The open source paradox
by jka on Saturday October 03, 2020 @08:48AM
(#24671673)
It's a bit of an unusual idea, but I'd suggest that making symptom reports more public would help -- as long as they are anonymized and opt-in.
That's a really tricky technical problem to achieve, since many bug reports depend on the user's local environment in order to reproduce the problem, and that could conflict with anonymization.
Making problems public creates incentives for the project to fix issues (since they can't hide their existence) and also provides opportunities and information for contributors to help resolve them (including for purely selfish reasons, to fix issues that affect their own systems too).
That's a really tricky technical problem to achieve, since many bug reports depend on the user's local environment in order to reproduce the problem, and that could conflict with anonymization.
Making problems public creates incentives for the project to fix issues (since they can't hide their existence) and also provides opportunities and information for contributors to help resolve them (including for purely selfish reasons, to fix issues that affect their own systems too).