fine words butter no parnips
I remember a million years ago reading a book called "Pascal programming with style".
The foreword contained a rhetorical request to express a preference for a programme that was correct first time or one that had been fixed 100 times and was known to be correct.
It has always been acceptable for a closed source, software-for-money business model to ship the product and wait for the bug reports then decide which ones were going to be addressed. This isn't so far away from the story that Sinclair shipped Spectrum computers they knew to be faulty and then reshipped the returns to new customers except that somehow that was seen to be unacceptable.
I have sat through close to twenty-five years of using (now) openSUSE and not being given features because they didn't yet exist, didn't work properly or because to implement them meant a security risk (e.g., CD-ROM drives in user space back in 2002). It was always about security.
On;y this evening I was reading a discussions about improvements to ext4 and what they meant for filesystem security. I've avoided the intense discussions about xxxBSD versus Linux kernels because I don't understand but happy in the knowledge that somebody cares.
Where, anywhere, in the closed source world are these painful (in every sense of the word) discussions taking place? Who care that one arm of government is bleating about what other arms of government have allowed to happen?
I remember and took part in the intense warfare over UK government policy proposals on using open standards and the amount of resource poured in by close source companies trying to resist.
The solution has always been to insist on open standards and interoperability and let software do what software does best. Somehow policy makers have never quite delivered