While there certainly are some people here arguing that the article is biased against Corel (I think I'd agree), the fact that Corel's actions is generating this kind of negative attention says to me that they probably should take a second look at how they're approaching open source.
The specific issue seems to lie in the question of "What is a bug?" - i.e. the waterline below which a bug report is a waste of space. I think a lot of the time this is more a consensus thing than spelled out, and it sounds like the consensus on what is worthy of a bug report was violated here - in the name of a corporation driving the project toward their interests. A breach of trust.
Some preventative maintenance could be to define what makes a bug a bug more clearly - just to close that door in the future. At the same time, cooking up a lot of non-critical protocols/definitions/etc adds friction to the process of working on the. So that's not really a great solution unless there's consensus that it's critical.
I've recently been involved in putting together the NetBeans open-source IDE project for Sun, and I think there is a valuable lesson here on what not to do. I intend that we learn them well.
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The specific issue seems to lie in the question of "What is a bug?" - i.e. the waterline below which a bug report is a waste of space. I think a lot of the time this is more a consensus thing than spelled out, and it sounds like the consensus on what is worthy of a bug report was violated here - in the name of a corporation driving the project toward their interests. A breach of trust.
Some preventative maintenance could be to define what makes a bug a bug more clearly - just to close that door in the future. At the same time, cooking up a lot of non-critical protocols/definitions/etc adds friction to the process of working on the. So that's not really a great solution unless there's consensus that it's critical.
I've recently been involved in putting together the NetBeans open-source IDE project for Sun, and I think there is a valuable lesson here on what not to do. I intend that we learn them well.