Why Open Source Does Not Always Work

I am a student (for some more weeks), and I am working at my study programme's computer department, since the beginning working on our Windows setup.

We take pride in having as much software as possible available on our computers (which are situated in half-a-dozen computer labs). In the browser department we try to have as many options as possible, as users have a tendency to be slightly religious.

So. The idea was to have both Netscape and Mozilla installed. Netscape has always been a nightmare, having a proprietary profile system, totally incompatible with Windows NT/2000/XP style profiles. Back in the 4.X days we managed to hack it, and it worked rather ok.

But then came Mozilla 1.1 and Netscape 7.0. Both very decent browsers. Both installed easily, and worked when using it with a local user. It even supported the NT/2000/XP style profiles! Happy me. Didn't last for long. Logging on as a domain user with folder redirection stopped them both dead in their tracks. And I mean dead. Die. No error message. Nothing whatsoever.

The first bug was registered late August 2002. It was resolved a week back. In the meantime my 700 users were deprived of both Mozilla and Netscape.

Study the Bugzilla entry to see what took so long. Or maybe what did not take so long. It was rejected as a critical bug for both Mozilla 1.2 and 1.3, and only now, in the 1.4 betas it work...

So my question; why use open source professionally when it takes 9 months to resolve a simple problem (the patch is tiny) simply because it is not a huge problem to the big majority? Reliability? Who cares anyway?

Posted by ludvig at May 27, 2003 12:26 AM | TrackBack