Re^4: Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with?

Contrast that with the open source world, where you get five good user-generated suggestions in five minutes, developer queries overnght, and patches the next morning.

<rant>
That's so untrue. Yes, there are a few projects in the open source world where that happens, but that's true for closed source projects as well. But people generalise the positive exceptions from the open source world, and the negative exceptions from the closed source world.

Look at Perl. Look at the list of open bugs. Some bugs are many years old. That's a far cry from "patches the next morning". Perl currently is on a 3 maintainance releases/year scedule, but that has been different as well. There were 14 months between 5.8.0 and 5.8.1, with no maint releases in between. Now I understand why this happened, I'm just pointing out that the open source world isn't all that shiny and fast as you suggest. And then, Perl is one of the better projects. How many open source projects are abandoned? How many authors unreachable? From how many is the status totally unknown? Care to do some statistics on sourceforge? Or CPAN for that matter?

Let's face it. No one has an interest in solving bugs that don't affect them. New features give a much bigger rewards, either because it sells, or because it gives more glory. You remember the person creating a popular CPAN module, like DBI. But do you know who solved the most bugs? You might put your list of CPAN modules on your resume. But do you list the patches you submitted to various open source projects? In fact, commercial vendors may have more of an initiative to fix bugs - not fixing them could mean losing customers (of course, if you have 10 million customers each paying a small amount losing 10 of them is less of an impact than if you have 300 customers each paying a million).

In my experience, all software sucks, and most vendors/authors are hard to move to fix their bugs. And it doesn't matter whether they are closed source or open source developers/vendors.
</rant>

Comment on Re^4: Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with?

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Re^5: Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with? by samizdat (Vicar) on Mar 10, 2005 at 14:47 UTC
Perhaps I am, as you say, putting "our side" in the best light. However, it is true that the OS world has more doorways, and, even if they aren't always open with the light on, at least one can find other ways to get the code and other places to ask. *THAT'S* what's different in the commercial software world.	[reply]
Re^5: Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with? by samizdat (Vicar) on Mar 14, 2005 at 14:47 UTC
For you downvoting Anonymous Cowards who choose to say that 'all software sucks', I just saw another example of the OS process working. Over the weekend, somebody wrote to the Embperl list that Embperl wouldn't compile on RedHat Enterprise Linux. Gerald Richter, the developer of Embperl, sent the guy a couple iterations of Makefile.pl, first to diagnose the problem and then to fix it. DONE!	[reply]