Development Methodology -faster (2)

• Release 1 software is usable, doing what real users need

  • Strong social push back on unstable software that is labeled "Version 1" - e.g. Gnome 1.0 was 2 months premature
  • Instead, many, many pre-releases

• "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"

  • Closed source developers would die for the kind of bug reports and/or enhancements that can and do arrive
  • Since releases are frequent, good fixes are much more likely to apply to the current source pool with fewer integration problems

• Time to production stability is accelerated

  • New major project - Gnome - first widespread beta to stable, less than 9 months
  • Major Linux Kernel release to stable - 6 months
  • Windows 95 GUI, 1995-2000?