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Evolution Bug-Hunt!
Matt Beale writes "Ximian is slated to release Evolution (a mail client for Gnome/Linux) by October 1st. In preperation, they are offering awards for finding bugs in Evolution! A important open project to participate in, AND i can win a palm VII, sweet!" My bug was that it kept crashing ;) October release is ambitious but very cool.
I don't think it's that ambitious. I've been using Evolution as my primary mail client for almost a year. It's improved a lot in that time, and for the past several months it's been quite reliable and has all the features I need. I don't think that getting it up to release quality on that schedule is an unreasonable expectation.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
That's not a bug, it's a feature! Seriously, though, having to download all that extra stuff put me off as well. I just know that at least 3 of those things will require me to download and install something else besides. No thanks. I just don't have the time or inclination right now.
As you said, if it was just one tarball to deal with then I'd have it running already!
Not only do I *not* mind helping a company out when they are contributing free software back to the community, but when they actively solicit help like this and give people rewards, it's only going to help them out. Also, I think having your customers hunt for bugs reinforces the idea that you're not claiming you're perfect (and thus not trying to pull the wool over their eyes about defects in the software) and also as part of the free software community it makes people feel like they have a stake in the software. Which would you rather use - a package where you felt you had some sort of stake, or MegaCorp's package where feature requests are forwarded to /dev/null and the support team consists of an auto-reply email system?
As a side effect, it's probably a smart marketing move since as I'd imagine, the Ximian FTP sites are hopping right now with slashdotters trying to download a copy of Evolution to win something.
So let's review:
- Free (as in beer) stuff (always cool)
- Free (as in speech) software (even cooler)
What a deal!
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Except when I try to buy Rupert I get:
/var/www/html/xproddetail.php on line 11
/var/www/html/xproddetail.php on line 13
/var/www/html/xproddetail.php on line 18
/var/www/html/xproddetail.php:11) in /var/www/include/shoplib.inc on line 50
[snip]
Warning: PostgreSQL query failed: ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "and" in
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid PostgreSQL result resource in
Warning: PostgreSQL query failed: ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "," in
Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at
[snip]
D'oh!
...j