Very interesting comments from the Mozilla guys on how they intend to clean up their bugzilla some. The most interesting parts, to me, were the statistics they had on usefulness of bug reports by age. It reminded me of a study I saw (no, I don’t remember it’s name or where I read it online) that talked about one of the advantages that open source has over typical proprietary development–namely that release early and release often provides more rapid feedback which enables faster development of the product and removes bugs faster. Of course, this can be offset by many different factors, but it was interesting to see the effect of this one factor. One thing I remember in particular was that the study actually had a suggestion for proprietary development to offset this disadvantage by ignoring bug reports against older versions of their products. Now granted, there are tradeoffs that need to be made in such decisions, but it looks like this Bugzilla work the Mozilla crew is doing is just an attempt to incorporate such tradeoffs to optimize their work instead of sticking with the extreme of keep-everything-open-unless-we-know-its-fixed. I’m wondering how/if similar things would work in Gnome and whether their measures for keeping the important old bugs open would be successful for us as well or if we’d have to do something different.