Quote:
Originally Posted by FJames
Opening up the PR process to all customers for a consumer product would be hopeless - most people have no idea how to properly perform tests or report problems, so the signal-to-noise ratio would be too low to be useful.
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I will agree with you that much of the advice given to Kobo on this forum is naive. The trouble is, the world of software development has changed and views expressed in quoted portion of your message are a bit outdated and hence dangerous for a company like Kobo.
The danger comes from the price that has to be paid when you opt to use open source components. You get an enormous amount of infrastructure, but it is not free. And the price is that you become vulnerable to hacking. Check the "dev" subforum here, Kobo devices are wide open. The last thing that Kobo can afford is to trigger a development of open source alternative for its reading software. It is not a trivial task, but it isn't impossible.
IMHO, they have no choice. They have to listen to community, and address the issues, or risk facing a competition with open source replacement. THAT is a losing battle. In the long run, that "community noise" associated with OSS development beats the living hell out of resources that
any company can throw at the maintenance of their software, and some crappy OSS designs have a tendency of reinventing and endlessly fixing themselves until they can do what is needed.
I do Linux, OSS and embedded development for living.