More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by open source's uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn't, and the number of fixers certainly doesn't. Only about 500 people have signed the legalese that would enable them to submit code to the project; since you need to do this even to make changes to the website, that will translate to far fewer than 500 volunteers submitting real code. A reasonable guess would be 50, or even five.
Meanwhile, there are some simple, hugely irritating bugs that are four years old. Two obvious ones: notes (or comments, as Word users call them) don't have word wrap; and spaces typed at the end of a line won't show. It's not many eyes making bugs shallow; more like many eyes making bugs invisible.
Most software has similar irritations. But complex open source projects seem uniquely badly placed to fix them. They rely on a very small group of programmers relative to the user base, and who have no direct incentive to work on the bugs that are important to users.
Perhaps like Microsoft Windows, which took many goes to hit its stride, OpenOffice 3.1 will be a world beater. But if it is, it will have nothing to do with the fact that any user can, in theory, fix things they don't like. It will be because large companies such as Sun, Google, and IBM have decided that open source is the cheapest way to gang up on Microsoft, because it means they need spend nothing on support.
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