Bugs… what can you do???

Long day… I am in the US and trying to fight the clock… I am right now very sure I will loose this battle over time…

In any case I just wanted to drop a quick note from last week. We found a bug – or more in detail one of our core developers – Andreas with some Nagios community friends found a really serious bug in our underlying Nagios project. Now – bugs are natural, they have always been there and they will most probably always be there – it’s only a question on how early you find them and how serious they are.

Three things springs to my mind:

• This is a good example were commercial OSS can make a huge difference, we add dedicated and payed developers to work in the projects and sometimes they find things that are wrong and they tell about it and they fix the problem. As a commercial vendor we obviously notify our customers and the commuity and the fix is automatically distributed via our yum update process.
• Fixing a bug requires access to source code – how else can you be sure it’s really a bug in the code? Compare oss to proprietary from a pure bug perspective – you have no choice, it’s like calling a customer support for slow Internet access, guess what the response will be… well it is never there fault that’s a given…
• How old is a bug? I’m sure with all the code written in the world that many software companies have a challange on when they really tell about a bug. Many times they may not know about it, but sometimes I am sure that they do know about it, but they take commercial risk and wait before they allocate resources to the problem/bug. This misbehavior is very limited in the OSS world for obvious reasons

So in summery – bugs are in OSS and propitiatory code, but again here is a another example of customer value were transparency assures quality. Today a lot of IT spendings go in to integration between platforms this will expose bugs, old and new and that’s ok as long as we can find out quickly so that we are not spending money and intelligent resources on practical problems that turns out to be old, hidden and sometimes known bugs.

Now I will fall a sleep. //JJ