ESR - the magic cauldron

[Erik Poupaert <erik dot poupaert at skynet dot be>]

I've regularly felt that the requirement to submit a self-contained example for a bug
report is a potent deterrent to submitting any.

Not only the bug reporter may not necessarily have the time or the inclination to
create this self-contained example, but it ties the role of finding the bug and
creating the example into one single person. It could perfectly be the case that
other volunteers can be found to create the self-contained example required?

If bug reports are valuable to the project, I would consider dropping the
request for an example. Maybe ESR has a few things to say after all.

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron-5.html

The real free-rider problems in open-source software are more a function of friction
costs in submitting patches than anything else. A potential contributor with little
stake in the cultural reputation game (see [HtN] ) may, in the absence of money
compensation, think ``It's not worth submitting this fix because I'll have to clean
up the patch, write a ChangeLog entry, and sign the FSF assignment papers...''. It's
for this reason that the number of contributors (and, at second order, the success
of) projects is strongly and inversely correlated with the number of hoops each
project makes a user go through to contribute. Such friction costs may be political
as well as mechanical. Together they may explain why the loose, amorphous Linux
culture has attracted orders of magnitude more cooperative energy than the more
tightly organized and centralized BSD efforts and why the Free Software Foundation
has receded in relative importance as Linux has risen.