This is my response to If

this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? by Andrew Brown of

The Guardian .

Andrew Brown claims that OpenOffice “illustrates the limitations of

open source” and establishes that my aphorism “Many eyes make bugs shallow” is

false, but his reasoning is shaky.

Mr Brown appears to be arguing that because open-source development isn’t

perfect, it isn’t any better than closed source. But there is no

silver bullet for the problem of software complexity — all

programs, open or closed, will have bugs. The figures he is waving

around (6K bugs, 5K feature requests) are meaningless in isolation.

In fact, controlled comparisons between closed- and open-source

versions of functionally equivalent programs have been done. Barton

Miller’s well-known “Fuzz Papers” suggested that open source programs

to have a 39% edge in reliability over closed-source equivalents.

So where are the comparative statistics for the bug load of Microsoft

Office? Do we know that it has fewer than 11,000 bugs and feature

requests outstanding? If Mr. Brown don’t know that, or at least have

those figures for a closed-source program of comparable size to

OpenOffice, he has no basis for asserting that the open-source method

is failing.

His article does inadvertently illustrate an important point, however.

If you make legal paperwork a requirement before volunteers can

contribute to a project, very few will do so. If OpenOffice is

failing its promise, it’s not because “many eyeballs” doesn’t work —

it’s because bureaucratic obstacles are driving the eyeballs away.