OSNews

b) Makes Microsoft look like a bunch of clowns.

FTA: "And Mozilla offers US$500 and a Mozilla T-shirt to those who find critical security flaws in its products, which include the Firefox Web browser."

By your own reasoning, that means Mozilla look like a bunch of clowns.
Probably not what you had in mind, but there it is.

Mozilla is an open source project that does not employ hundreds of very already well paid programmers. They give bounties in order to encourage volunteers to the code base.

It's like giving kids (amateur programmers) prizes for tidying up the room. Doing the same for adults (paid 30-something professionals) shows bad management, and a lack of seriousness regarding your product that is used on 90% of all desktops in the world. This childish behaviour regarding a massively deployed corporate product (whereas Firefox is a consumer product) just reflects on Microsoft.

Windows Vista is not an "anyone can jump in and help" project, there should be proper management for finding bugs and processing them with correct time and resources given to both find and fix them, and avoid them in the first place.

Edited 2006-05-15 10:45

Windows Vista is not an "anyone can jump in and help" project, there should be proper management for finding bugs and processing them with correct time and resources given to both find and fix them, and avoid them in the first place.

Yes, but what's wrong with giving some extra incentive? EVERY company does that. It can be in the form of a pat on the back, extra stocks, salary raise, bonus, etc. It's perfectly normal, and an accepted behaviour all throughout the western world.

Some people will find ANYTHING to pick on Microsoft.

Every other company keeps it within their walls.

And this was meant to be kept within MS's walls. It's not their fault that an internal email become such a big story.

I'll tell you what's wrong with it: these guys are ALREADY working on Vista fulltime! This is just a way for management to get them to give up their weekends. I wouldn't bite.

How productive can you be working on a codebase during the weekend that you've already been feverishly working on during the week? Those that do go for this minute carrot could see themselves burning out - which obviously harms productivity.

This is simply bad management. And the prize? From Microsoft with billions in the bank? Please. If I worked on the Vista team I'd feel seriously insulted.

Ok, my wrong, mod me down, for this is a call for Vista devs, not ordinary mortals. Mea culpa.

Mozilla is a corporation who recently admitted having had close to 70 million USD in profit last year. And yes, they have hundreds of employees.

"This childish behaviour regarding a massively deployed corporate product (whereas Firefox is a consumer product) just reflects on Microsoft."

While I agree that it's childish, there is no way that Vista is a corporate product. It's a consumer product, because no corporation in their right mind would upgrade to something that requires a lot more hardware, just for some pretty transparency.

Microsoft is using more and more of the Open Source development model. They do not view their community as merely end-users, but testers and low-level developers now.

Learn to read first, then shut up.

well.. I use XP, so I fight bugs every weekend

Best way to earn some cash ever!!

you submit a couple of bits of bug ridden code during the day at work, get home, 'fix them', and your a chunk of cash happier :-p

Best way to earn some cash ever!!
you submit a couple of bits of bug ridden code during the day at work, get home, 'fix them', and your a chunk of cash happier :-p

Except that their source control/issue tracking system would track your check-ins and bugs. It'd be really easy for them to see what you did.

This seems to be more like a media stunt so they can say, "Hey look, we have a community code project for Windows too!".

Considering that the bounty was announced in email to Vista devs, and then got leaked into public by someone on the recepient list, I don't see how you can call it media stunt.

You dont have that option anyway. The email is to their top notch programmers, not to you or anyone else, unless they work at Microsoft, on Vista project.

Maybe it's my reluctance to any program MS related.
But that it is announced to the dev list first does not say it will not be (ab)used for pr purposes.
Hopefully i'm wrong though

This bounty is for the Vista developers at Microsoft. They are writing the source code and probably the few that have access to it. The bounty is way for them to have an incentive to fix any bugs that may appear in their source.

Thank you for the answer.

People bitch about every company here, you are right though, Microsoft ususally get it more than others.

However, there is good reason for this. Can you honestly say that every Microsoft product you have bought does everything it was advertised to do. Without flaws, and without errors, and never crashed or froze the machine ?

If you say yes, then good for you, however, one persons experience is totally different from anothers, who might have crashes every few hours on the same software.

People expect to use their computers as tools, just another thing on the desk to get their work done, and as such, they expect it to work.

Mostly, around OS sites such as this it is a slanging match of "my OS is better than yours", it has been so for as long as I can remember, (BTW - My Spectrum IS better than your C64), but also, there is a lot people here who come online and are very anti the very OS they use themselves. Instead of sharing the bad experiences and getting help fixing them they just say "Windows XP is crap/ Linux is crap/ Mac OSX is crap".

There is an old saying, "a bad workman always blames his tools", however, this is different, in that the blame is aimed not at the tools, (usually !), but at the toolmaker.

I use various versions of Linux, however, I will be the first to shout down Ubuntu, as it is overhyped, and slow.

I have installed software from the Ubuntu repositories, and the software has frozen X a few times. Software in a distros repositories are supposed to be build specifically for that distro. Of course, I submit the bug reports, but also, I am verbal about the errors on forums where people are praising Ubuntu unfoundedly.

Mandriva, used to be one of my favourite distros, however, in their efforts to make Mandriva the ultimate desktop, they made it look completely silly. The crow with the stars for eyes looked too "drugged up", and the penguin bust looking skyward was too arty-farty for my tastes.

Hopefully, you will get the meaning of my post...... but, there is also muppets around here who just post up/down any post they see that praises/abuses the OS they use, without any merit on the post itself.

Rant over, raver

Except Microsoft didn't "throw up" this news. It was an email sent to employees, not meant for the media. But with a company the size of MS, stuff gets leaked easily.

"Are those bounties tax-able? Or will they be distributed as a 'gift?' "
- Probably only for those that make over $300,000.00 a year and have clever accountants.

Seriously, is it just me or does $100 sound kinda cheap? MS is worth a heck of a lot, and if they're SO concerned about debugging Vista - wouldn't that be worth more than a chincy little C-note?

And one wonders whether or not the type of bug you find will effect the payment. Does a video rendering bug count as much as a filesystem bug?

Not that any of us in the outside-MS world can participate, but this sounds a lot like the Bush administration's "hundred dollar rebate" scheme to 'compensate' for rediculous gas prices. I try to stay away from political comments as much as possible, but there's some parallel in that.

Article: "VeriSign's iDefense offered to pay US$10,000 for reports of flaws that end up with a "critical" severity rating in a Microsoft Security Bulletin"
- Now THAT'S more like it...

Is the $100 not just IF the dev finds a verifiable bug ? If he finds none, then does he get any cash for essentially working his weekends ?

It's $100 EACH bug they fix. Not $100 flat for the weekend. Plus, it's also a race. They tally up the numbers and whoever fixed the most bugs in that weekend earns an extra $500 on top of N * $100 where N = number of bugs fixed.

http://www.activewin.com/awin/comments.asp?HeadlineIndex=34927

The original article was actually posted on ActiveWin and the info is more cut-and-dry on that page. Less fluff than the ZDNet article.

Those guys could make a lot of money in a short amount of time, depending on how long it takes to fix a particular bug, number of hours worked, etc.

Yeah, it's quite the gamble though. If you fix no bugs, or fix them after the other devs, you've spent your weekend working for free. Score.

Aside from this, I find it hard to believe Microsoft OS developers are paid so mildly that a few hundred here or there is that big of an incentive. If you do a lot of investing (i.e. any of them watching their retirement accounts or other investments) probably have financial swings much bigger than that in various 3 day stretches anyway.

However, based on the responses I'm reading here, clearly my "screw you, it's my weekend, and I'll spend it how I want" attitude is in the minority.

To each their own.

Still has to be one of the least dignified moves in commercial software I've ever heard. Foss begging on the streets is, well how it gets started but commercial I mean really...