Comment 1658 for bug 1

>
> It takes a while to dig into a project and although I have invested a few
> time for 2 or 3 projects to fix a few bugs, I cannot dig into every project
> where I find bugs. I have to rely on others fixing it

The point isn't that you should try to fix everything yourself, but that
always have much more than just a single place to go, that is pretty much
guaranteed to screw you.

I have written code that I knew will never be seen by others and other code
> I have written with the others in mind. Already the others in mind made my
> code cleaner and better documented.
>
And your diligence makes you extremely respectable at least in my book, but
unfortunately not everyone is like that. For example the good old M$ with
their Hyper-V drivers<http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA3OTA>
:

> As a result of being beaten through staging process, their Hyper-V drivers
> are now significantly cleaner and tighter to the point of 60% reduction in
> the overall lines of code, significant performance and stability
> improvements were made, and a solid architectural basis created.

That tells you two things:

   1. *they're not ashamed to publicly produce crap*
   2. *they never improve it on their own, even if it is in their own best
   interest*

That gives you a taste of their nature (and a reason why I don't trust the
word they say), but there are way too many completely valid reasons to
suspect that the reality is much worse than that. For example these quotes:

This one officially confirms what I already said - they just don't care
about their customers as long as it's profitable:

> There are no significant bugs in our released software that any
> significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new
> version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take
> a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy
> a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd
> buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on
> that basis.

Bill Gates, Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October
1995)<http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html>

This one officially confirms, that they deliberately lock users to their
software and sabotage competition, because it's highly profitable:

> One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office
> documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the
> most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting
> any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends
> on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Bill Gates' 1998 a memo to the Office product
group<http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf>

Feel free to substitute "correctly rendering Office documents" for
"reliably reproducing their interfaces" and see where this is going.
This, my friends, is why proprietary software sucks and why we have these
problems. Not that we didn't contribute more than enough ourselves, but the
root cause is the ruthlessness of (not only) today's businesses.