Now - I know that the majority of my readership is British, and thus party to one of those little paradoxes in life - the ability to moan incessantly, without actually complaining, and remaining remarkably optimistic. It’s part of our national identity at times, but it’s something that I believe we need to fight.

(FWIW I wrote a formal complaint to FirstScotRail the other day, having moaned here )

Those of you who are regular readers may have noticed a slight bias recently to pimping Jokosher, the audio editing software that I have recently begun to help out on. Actually working as a developer has reinforced an aspect of open source development that I confess I have previously not spent enough time on.

Bug reporting.

We have been preconditioned, particularly in the area of computers, to put up with little niggles and problems. This has been because the majority of software that people use is proprietary, and used by hundreds of thousands of users, and there isn’t a formalised feedback process for the ‘ordinary’ user.
Open source is different - we devlopers love to receive indications of problems - we want to know the little niggles, the ‘if I do these three things and hold down these eight keys then it does this’ issues. Because we can fix them, and we want to. Because we want our software to be better.

So - your challenge, should you decide to accept it…… the next time you are using a piece of open source software (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Linux, etc, etc, etc) and something happens, and you think ‘I wish it didn’t do that’, then go to their website, and log a bug. Tell them that it doesn’t work. Merely knowing that its a problem will help them fix it.

mrBen

A few notes on logging bugs:
1. It’s worth double checking that someone hasn’t already reported it
2. Put in as much helpful information as you can - in particular the version of the software you are using, and how to replicate the problem. if they can’t replicate it, then it’s really hard to fix.
3. Make sure that you can replicate it with reasonable frequency.