Although I wonder if the curves are accurate? The reason I say this is you are assuming a final number of bug of 10,000. Well, Wine must have started with 0 bugs, then 1 then 100 etc. IIRC Wine started off chasing Win 16 then Win32, 95, 98, NT, NT5 etc… onto the joys of Vista and Win 7 on the horizon. I think the sliding target window might make your curve much more shallow.

I think your measurement of Happy Users vs Unhappy Users is a spot on measure!

Cheers, Kevin

PS I personally find Wine to be the most fascinating open source project out there. Mostly because of the David vs Goliath nature of the chase. And I think the head chopping moment will come faster than many think too!

Most applications only use a subset of any particular component
Most applications use a little bit of many different components
Most applications only need partial (or stub) implementations of components they use

If we tried to do one DLL at a time, even with very good splitting of the labor it would be an exceptionally long time before actual real world applications started working.

If we tried splitting development based solely on particular apps, a substantial amount of time would be spent implementing hacks that make one program work but don’t implement the underlying function correctly. Do that enough and you waste time for everyone as people write wrong code to correctly handle underlying wrong code, ultimately making it take much longer to get to that tipping point where collateral damage works in your favor.

a. Test what the component does.

b. Test what all known apps do with the component

c. Implement the component.

All of this is very much “contained”. You have one dll, you can outsource and modularise development. The real problem emerges as the issues are not contained. You have 50% components working with 50% components which multiplies the bugs, and hope to get it to 50% and 60% to support an app 90% (but in the next version of Wine it will break). A component wise 100% implementation means: this element is “done”, and for the next application we need to implement this component. II.) There should be an external project which just works on getting a single product or product line work with fine. Like Linux-Xbox you have a project of people interested to get e.g. Microsoft Office run with Wine. You can donate to that project. It is a tangible goal which is not open ended, all results of the project end up in Wine, they test the latest applications, they maybe get financial support of companies, vendors, users, a single hub with a tangible objective which can be achieved 100%, okay, there is always some work. III.) Application feedback. It must be possible to backtrace function in a way that you can find out which real world program call this function with which parameters. IV.) For the test suite you can use reverse engineering but reverse engineering should be better done by another team. Maybe even Microsoft sourcecode can be consulted by those who built the testsuite.

I wish National Geographic would do a story on the Ubuntu phenomenon, warts and all. They could do it justice with their excellent filming, and so many more people would get exposure. In return, they get a huge global story of cooperation and social coordination.

Increased exposure would make it easier for those who know it to have it available at work. Coworkers who like using it would bring it home. It’s a cycle that MS beat Apple and Amiga with — instead of marketing with schools, they marketed to people with the checkbook, management and working people.

You keep up the good work with Wine, and your study will help tremendously for your focus. As you improve, we’ll keep moving one app at a time out of our virtual machines.

A perfect example is a very popular OEM chip used in many, many laptop webcams …

— Start quote from Launchpad bug —
Ubuntu 8.04: Worked out of the box
Ubuntu 8.10: Need to compile and install manually a driver
Ubuntu 9.04: Compilation and load work but webcam is unusable

Can it be a regression of the stkwebcam module on ubuntu 9.04?
— End quote from Launchpad bug —