Bug shallowness in open-source, Macintosh software

Central to the power of open-source software is bug shallowness, the relative ease of finding and fixing bugs. The open-source movement began with Unix software, so many users were also programmers capable of finding and fixing bugs given the source code. But as the open-source movement reaches the Macintosh platform, bugs may not be shallow because few Macintosh users are programmers. Based on reports from open-source developers, I, however, conclude that that bugs are as shallow in open-source, Macintosh software as in any other open-source software. Introduction In The Cathedral and The Bazaar, Raymond proposes the bazaar model of open-source development, summarized by several heuristics given throughout the essay [Raymond00]. Most of them, in my opinion, work well for all open-source software. However, two of them may present a problem for open-source, Macintosh software: 6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. 7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. Which leads to: 8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. In other words, (6) and (7) make bugs shallow (8) [Raymond00]. In this paper I will explain why I believe these heuristics may fail in open-source, Macintosh software to cause a reduction in bug shallowness and will show how well my beliefs correspond with real-world development. Raymond uses the terms cathedral and bazaar as metaphors for models of open-source development. In the cathedral model, a few developers do all the work and, although the source code is published, there is little expectation (or even active discouragement) of community programming support. Emacs, BSD, and Darwin are examples of cathedral development. The bazaar model, in contrast, has a small team of administrators (usually just one person) who coordinates a large community of co-developers. The best known example is Linux, although because of Raymond, the bazaar model is, if not achieved, strived for by most open-source projects. [Raymond00] Further, referring back to (8), bug shallowness is a term Raymond and Torvalds use to describe how easily bugs are fixed. Although bug shallowness is not presented as a rigorous, technical term, its metaphor is simple to follow: bugs arèburied' in programs; shallow bugs can bèdug' out quickly and fixed; deep bugs take a long time to bèdug' out. The point