[kwlug-disc] given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow?

[unsolicited]

Bob Jonkman wrote, On 01/08/2010 11:41 PM:
> Insurance Squared writes:
> 
>> Boggles my mind that what I'm running on my desktop has been built by 
>> people doing it for free after work.
> 
> Mostly not.  I think that many (most) of the F/LOSS tools and programs 
> have been written by corporate programmers writing for their 
> corporation.  The spinoffs of Libre software have made their code 
> available to the rest of us.
> 
> Think of Novell's SUSE development.  Here is a commercial Linux 
> development company, releasing their code for free.  But those guys get 
> *paid* by Novell to do that.  Granted, Novell pays them (and other 
> programmers) to build proprietary applications that run on SUSE, but 
> first they need to build the foundation OS needed by those proprietary 
> applications, and that foundation OS is released freely.

OK, but be fair. Novell bought SUSE. Re-cast your thoughts from the 
perspective of SUSE before it was purchased. i.e. from the position of 
the developers who got SUSE that far. IIRC, was there not a SUSE 
non-free version as well? If so, do you still feel the same about the 
free version of the time?

How about Debian? Fedora? CentOS? Ubuntu? [Canonical being a 
charitable organization (?), who's contribution is mostly a tighter / 
more integrated version of a Debian repository. Marketing, etc. Less 
so code contribution. But they probably do do bug reports so that 
fixes go into Debian and the results come back up to their repositories.]