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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor.

I have filed many bug reports for paid software over the years. The bugs were fixed exactly 0% of the time. If they ever gave a reason, it was along the lines of "you are a special snowflake, nobody else has had that problem, so it isn't worth fixing".

Eventually, I just stopped filing bug reports.

Things aren't better with OSS, either, though I resent went bugs get closed because they're old.

Our policy with D is we never close bugs, no matter how old they are, unless we fix them or no longer have users for it (like D version 1).

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> I resent went bugs get closed because they're old

I'm picturing the guy who came up with this idea sitting at his desk surrounded by unopened bills.

well, you're wrong because of all the ideas my ADHD mind ever came up with - that wasn't one of them.

While I understand your lack of success with bug reports, and I thank you for your stance on (not) closing bugs, note how the average manager got what he wanted:. A proof that reasonable effort has been made, and it's not his fault. This allows survival in a politically piosonous environment. If the bug got fixed is generally not their concern, others will have to deal with it and move on.

Besides, I once got Oracle to fix a bug. It took months and I basically had to spell the fix out to them, but it actually is possible.

Nice job! How long did you have to wait for the new software version after the bug fix?

A few months ago, one of our young devs got a PR accepted to fix a tiny little Spark bug that had been bothering us for a while. The big boss meeting was happy, plenty of virtual pats on the backs and congratulations.

And then someone had to go and ask when we'd see the fix in our DataBricks cluster.

Have you ever filled a bug for the JDK? I was at 20 emails, plus having to create accounts and give paperwork that our company had a license for a one-liner correction of a major bug when I decided to abandon and wrap my code in an exception catcher and manage it on my side...

> I have filed many bug reports for paid software over the years. The bugs were fixed exactly 0% of the time

In my experience, the big difference is buying software (good luck with getting Microsoft fixing a bug in office or windows; no one even tries) vs buying a service. If we bought specialized custom software support for some expensive hardware, those companies jump when there is a question.

They jump if you paid for a service contract. If you paid for a product, those companies owe you something fit for its intended purpose, and bugs are not that.

What's the point of keeping open bugs if you never fix them? It's not a cost free decision.

They are still problems that need fixing, some day someone may be doing work on the project without knowing what to work on and having a backlog of issues categorised by importance/etc will be useful in that situation.

It is cost free. It prevents people from filing it again. It provides insight into later problems. It provides a place where people can ask and offer advice on working around it. Sometimes an intractable bug becomes more tractable later. It can provide a clue to a later bug report. Sometimes someone new has a brainwave on how to fix it.

That would require a project be worthwhile to stick around long enough for an opportunity for someone new to come along, let alone come along and be interested in it. It's obvious that most career programmers are only used to ("interested in"?) pushing devops shovelware onto GitHub and other forms of busywork, so it shows in their bug-handling hygiene.

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