Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody wants to fix bugs that only one developer has. It's just not worth it. … Also, if you fix it, who knows what else will regress. That also imposes a bias towards not fixing these kinds of bugs. This is an interesting cognitive hazard: it's relatively easy to measure the cost of paying a developer to fix a bug and possible to estimate the cost of getting it wrong but there's no way to measure the cost to every…
... Or also never fix anything that we won't be able to sell and make money from (this is, the next shiny thing, whatever it happens to be at the time). The cognitive hazard is a good observation. But I think the most important one is the imbalance of interest, which is where open source shines: MS gets zero value from fixing this bug and a lot of value from adding new features, but for this one developer this bug co…
Re: I found a bug in the .NET framework and fixed it by hand-altering the DLL
#121I wonder whether we'll see more of a hybrid model where companies either use something like Red Hat's RHEL / Fedora level of support split or a time-delayed OSS release so they can have some period of proprietary advantage while allowing customers access and allowing some chance for major outside contributions or tangents. Arguably Apple is doing something not entirely unlike that but they haven't hit the right balance yet.