[Yardlink]

Users don't fix bugs in open source software. For evidence, look at OpenOffice and LibreOffice, both riddled with some horrifying bugs that have been repeatedly documented for years. There's even a guy complaining about one well-known bug in a TED talk. Yet somehow none of their millions of users have fixed them.

These two programs are a prime example of how open source is just as inaccessible as closed source. It's simply too difficult to learn a large complex codebase. People have their own jobs to get on with.

[williamstein]

"Users don't fix bugs in open source software." The serious research-mathematics users of Sage often do fix bugs in Sage, and contribute fixes back. This is one reason a typical Sage release has well over 100 contributors, and we have had overall about 500 contributors to Sage (see http://trac.sagemath.org/). There's a huge difference in programming skills between typical research mathematics Sage users and OpenOffice users, because all such Sage users are programmers, and the language they use to interact with Sage is the language it is mostly written in. Yes, Sage has subcomponents in other languages, but an enormous amount -- maybe the majority by now -- of Sage is in Python and Cython. Also, successful mathematicians are extremely intense and dogged in pursuing something they get passionate about. Often they will devote a decade or more to attacking a problem, so spending a few days learning Cython (say) and debugging code is relatively little time in comparison to the overall time they devote to a problem. Anyway, I'm glad that when I started Sage I didn't believe the statement "Users don't fix bugs in open source software" applies universally. I didn't know either way, so I waited to see, and was genuinely surprised at how false that statement actually is in the case of Sage.

[csirac2]

Yeah, LibreOffice has a few issues, but they don't punch me in the face daily like I surprisingly found MS Word does recently. After 14 years of using soffice -> OpenOffice -> LibreOffice simply out of not wanting to keep a windows box/VM, my recent 1 week experience with Word opened my eyes to just how glitchy the other side of the fence still is. An undo stack that doesn't. Image placement that constantly explodes like it's 1997. Press print and my citations/references decide they'll include neighbouring paragraphs instead of just referenced header text. And just try placing two images next to each other without making tables first... This is a trivial operation in libre office. I was also amazed to find that libre office far more readily provides consistent editing experience of various objects across the suite: paste an excel sheet into word? Nope, that'll make crappy exploding word tables. Paste drawing from Visio? Might as well be a JPEG now, because you can't edit that from the word doc. I also really missed the anchor icon that OO/LO provides to indicate where exactly in the text flow you're positioning an object. Sorry for the rant...