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> users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves. FWIW, this is probably both an historical attitude and a population difference. If you and a colleague at a university just made csh to get your jobs done, then you will help each other out by doing the development. Because ya'll are also the entire userbase, then you are also the beta-testers. Back then, if you used a computer, it was because you were either developing software or entering data for a developer. Not very many non-developer users touched computers until the 80s; most people developed some kind of software, even if it was trivial BASIC programs on a Commodore. In the OSS world, you have always been expected to contribute fixes to bugs that affected you, because the tools and source code were in your hands. For most non-developers, there exists only a lack of skill to stop them from fixing bugs or at least filing usable bug reports. Nowadays, there are much more users who cannot or do not submit bug reports, let alone develop software. Nevertheless, the attitude since the days of csh has not changed much, because not a generation has passed since OSS went somewhat mainstream (e.g. in the data center). Whether OSS will leave behind the historical attitude that users should be able to understand the software they use (this seems a responsible attitude to me) remains to be seen. Regardless, the developer-base will likely continue to proportionally shrink and users will proportionally become less able to understand their computers. |