Mozilla "reply all" bug not fixed 5 years later

When I filed this Mozilla MailNews bug back in 2002 I never expected it would have been outstanding for so long. net users like me are often keen to contribute where we can to Free Software and Open Source projects, and the developers encourage us to help out where we can, so I was happy to file the bug info... It's a great feeling when you file a bug report, get an email back from a developer an hour later, and within a few days a discussion, and patch fixing the issue has been committed to the software for the next release.

Unfortunately it doesn't always work like this, and my Mozilla bug reports (I've still got loads outstanding at present) have largely never been touched by the hand of a developer -- which kind of makes we wonder if my time was well spent back in 2002? .. and raises the wider question of if developers should solicit bug reports and community involvement when there aren't the QA and developer resources to deal with that influx of requested bug reports? I think a little more upfront info would let people decide if they want to spend time contributing to something which may be never looked at, when they could be contributing their time to a project which will really make the most of the bug reports (KDE, GCC and Binutils projects spring to mind).

It's odd to think that even MS fixed IE6 and released IE7 before my bug reports got tackled. Can Mozilla Foundation really lead and beat Microsoft in the browser market when their ability to tackle bugs is so stunted? I expected more, bit of a disappointment when they fall short of what other projects achieve. Maybe it's time for a different development approach, passing on to the next generation the control of the Mozilla code-base.

This is probably one of the problems with the Free Software/Open Source bazaar development model. What gets attention is what is worthy of attention in the eyes of the developer, not a project manager who can maintain broad focus on the whole software package. Which means QA and bug triaging often get left by the way side, as they're not interesting or important enough to developers who don't have enough time as it is.

The real solution is for business backers to pay to fill in the gaps I believe, providing developers to work on documentation, and QA staff to test and triage bug reports. Distributions do this a little, but not to the extent we really need, they're largely just packagers and testing their own distros. I wonder how many companies relying on Firefox and Thunderbird have contributed coders or subsistence funds to either of those projects? At least this bug I reported to Mozilla got fixed. See this OpenOffice bug I reported on Launchpad too, got closed and never passed up to OpenOffice, which kind of defeats the purpose of Launchpad!