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Comment by kordless | Hacker News Reader

I believe the problem lies with the "typical" business models for software companies.

The problem lies with the amount of financial resources available to software users. Users can afford buggy software. They can't afford non-buggy software except for a very small number of uses.

Curious about your point. How would this apply to free open source software? What us the equivalent of affordability in it?

The high cost of bug-free FOSS is the time the developers can volunteer to develop it, which takes away from time spent on additional features. The developer's time is a limited resource that has to be spent where it is best utilized, and making the software bug-free might not be the right place.

Yes, good point. In both cases the limit is time. How do you think one should decide on what qualifies as best utilized? What would count as additional features? Does documentation count as a feature in software?

If there is anything sacred about software, it's the documentation.

So documentation is an additional feature worth investing time over fixing bugs?

It may sound silly to some but I'm really interested in what people think about this.

Often the buggy software turns out more expensive. It can be a false economy not putting that extra time in to ship stable software.

If you ship something that loses data and you have to start restoring backups and patching data, it probably would've been cheaper to do a little extra testing.

Like everything; it's a tradeoff. I think we're universally bad at playing the game!

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