[jpr]

I think this illustrates why FOSS hasn't taken, and probably won't take the "mainstream" by storm.

Users communicating directly with developers is a nice idea that sounds good at first, but unfortunately it can't really work when

a) there are many orders of magnitude more users than developers

b) users are not technologically advanced enough to provide the developers with useful (and preferably only useful) information about the bugs

This means that developers are effectively DoS:ed to death when trying to directly support a piece of software with lots of non-tech-geek users. What could solve the problem would be a group of people between developers and users which could translate normal language to and from tech-speak, and evaluate the importance of different bugs. I guess this can be automated to some extent with bug-tracking software, but I don't think it's enough when the software in question has lots and lots of users.