Open Source and the Five Minute Fix
By Mark Hinkle on May 22, 2007 in News Items, Zen of Open Source
This is not the norm, but it’s a great testament to the open source development model…
We got an email form a user in Germany, Jürgen who reported a bug in our SVN trunk. Since he could see the source code he not only pointed out the error but proposed a fix.
thank you for providing your tool for free. I started my first
installation yesterday evening, so until know I can’t tell anything
serious about it - but it should be great - its python
I found two errors in the svn trunk from yesterday evening. For now I
like to report it with this mail: ….
Five minutes later I got a reply from one of our developers Chris “rootforce” Blunck:
Jurgen,
Thank you for downloading Zenoss and thank you for taking the time to
send in a ticket!These two fixes were incorporated in the following ChangeSets:
http://dev.zenoss.org/trac/changeset/5487
http://dev.zenoss.org/trac/changeset/5486
Now I know probably a few more than five minutes went by between the emails, but not much more, and in that short time frame someone not only reported the flaw but a developer also fixed it.
Now compare that to a proprietary software release cycle were a fix wouldn’t be introduced in many cases is months or even and the user would have no visibility into what’s causing the problem. In this case anyone pulling the source for Zenoss Core can benefit from these updates almost immediately. When we do a new build of Zenoss Core in the upcoming days all the users of the Zenoss Core binaries benefit as well.
This is one of many reasons why we love open source development, it allows us to develop software quickly and it allows our users to help us improve the quality.
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Steffen | May 30, 2007 | Reply
Great speed.
I guess I will have to dig a bit deeper into all of this, as up to now I am still doodeling with your VM Machine version 1.