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I do understand your point. With a project the size of KDE, it may even be valid. The difference as I see it, has to do with the motivation/ability of the developers. With a closed-source project, the company must balance talent with costs, thus the developers assigned to the project usually barely cover the needs of that project. Hence, their ability to discover, track, and correct bugs is limited by time and priorities.

With FLOSS, any developer can join the project. The project cansupport as many interested developers as want to join. This, plus the motivation of the involved developers being more project-oriented than closed-source developers, and yes--all bugs are shallow in comparison with closed-source projects.

This, plus the motivation of the involved developers being more project-oriented than closed-source developers, and yes--all bugs are shallow in comparison with closed-source projects.

That's a buttload of crap. Closed-source developers aren't any less "project-oriented" than open source developers. Probably more so. I know you'd like to think so but bugs aren't shallow in either methodology.

I'll disagree with that. I don't think that OSS programmers are necessarily more motivated or more able than their closed-source counterparts. Professional programmers are like everyone else, in the sense that most of them take some amount of pride in their work, and few of them want to be seen as Charlie Codegrinder, doing whatever bare minimum is necessary to keep from getting fired.

As far as ability goes, most OSS programmers are limited in what they can contribute by the simple fact that almost all of them have to have day jobs, so as to put food on the table and keep the lights on and so forth. It's awfully hard to put in an 80-hour week when you're up against a deadline for your real job, and then come home and not be too fried to put some real effort into hobby programming. Unless by "ability" you mean "talent", but I don't think either OSS or closed-source projects have a monopoly on talent.

Anyway, where you have OSS projects with a dedicated core of talented programmers, the output is generally of high quality. But of course, that's equally true for closed-source software.