25 Jul
2010
25 Jul
'10
6:12 p.m.
On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Harry Van Haaren
<harryhaaren(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I for myself can say I'm very happy if another
coder looks trough my code, I
know there
are plenty of nasty pointer monsters and other meanies around that are out
to get me.
If my code was proprietary the software would be losing out as these
accidents waiting to
happen wouldnt get fixed, they *would* happen.
yes, its a certainly good thing to have code review. but code review
(let alone patches) presupposes several things:
* other people with the technical expertise to review the code
* other people with the motivation to review the code
* other people with the time to review the code
the more specialized the code is, the less likely it is that these 3
conditions will be met. audio plugins are very specialized code. its
not impossible that somebody else is going to be able to find issues
with mike's plugins (if they exist), but its not really very likely
either. in such cases, my experience suggests that what is MUCH more
important than open source status is having a suitably sized group of
really skilled testers who know how to test and are willing to do so.
these are almost as hard to find as other developers, and the ardour
community is blessed to have several. good test/bug reports make fixes
easy, and worth doing.
there are other reasons for GPL'ing software, but i don't believe that
this is particular reason ("more eyes make bugs shallow") is a
compelling one for niche software.
--p