CIO Magazine reports something that many of us take for granted, but which little data has previously been available to support:
The open-source development process is much, much faster at fixing bugs than the proprietary-software development process. Days faster, in fact.
CIO's Esther Schindler reports:
According to a survey commmissioned by BMC and conducted by Forrester analyst Carey Schwaber, the average time to resolve an application problem is 6.9 days for enterprise developers and 6.7 days for software vendors. Ten percent of those problems take 10 days to solve, says the report. Developers spend just over an hour documenting the problem; and, if given that hour back, they'd use it to create enhancements to the application they are working on....
...Evans Data Corporation (EDC) just finished its twice-yearly report, resulting from a survey of several hundred open-source and Linux developers (with some managers, but primarily folks-who-code). The EDC numbers are somewhat different. The average time between discovery and solution of a serious bug, for 36 percent of open-source developers is under 8 hours. Hours. Not days. Not a week.
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9786034-16.html