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Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

I've rarely ever had Ubuntu bug reports be useful (and I follow up with more info when I'm asked) but can I really be annoyed? It's an open source product. I'm a software engineer. When it's important enjoy, I'll fix it. About the only useful thing is that other people also discuss it there.

Launchpad is useful as a single interface and Ubuntu-bug reports lots of info automatically so that's why I report there. Maybe I should use upstream.

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In my experience its really bad for your mental health to read the source code of software you use, there is a troubling amount of horrific code in widespread use.

Great that you can cover everything from security to networking in a multimillion LOC project. I guess this is not a average software engineer skillset.

Outside of certain areas - if you manage to reliably reproduce the bug, you're likely to able understand the bug, and it's likely you can fix it.

But sure, there are areas where things can go very wrong. Prime example being the horrible Debian ssh/ssl key gen entropy bug:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00...

(note that this was a "bug-fix" introduced after a misguided effort of looking for bad code - so a bit different from the typical "I triggered this bug in normal use").

I took your comment to mean that we shouldn't demand the time of volunteer open-source developers. I agree. But Canonical is a for-profit company.

Unless you are paying them, yourself, can you really expect more from them than from a volunteer developer? Maybe they're quite responsive to their enterprise customers. I, personally, suspect they are. On average that may lead to at least some trickle down gains for non-enterprise users, even if their specific reports are useless and pointless.

Fair enough, although I would expect some sort of loss-leader level of support that isn't entirely useless, if you are to drive enterprise adoption from the bottom-up.

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