First up if a package is uninteresting or really badly written it usually gets a handful of bug reports and that is it. However if a package is popular or provides a very unique feature it will generate a fair amount of bug reports and feature requests. Unfortunately a fair number are bogus, but obviously there will be a number of real bug reports too. Since this is all open source the time every maintainer has to allocate to a given package varies wildly. So it can happen that after a while if less activity there is a mind numbing bug count for a package that works perfectly well for thousands of users. But probably if the bugs are fixed the package would be even more useful. Especially users coming to a package who find a huge bug count are also scared off .. even if the bug count is just a result of a lot of bogus and/or duplicate bug reports. Its hard to tell for a new comer.

Well I fear it is not that simple. As avid readers of my blog may have noticed I have some beef with the Zend PHP IDE proposal that was recently accepted by the Eclipse Foundation. After studying the Eclipse Foundation governance rules, looking at the facts and talking to people from Zend, I am reminded once again that it is important that people realize that open source is not about licenses.

Open source is not a marketing toy.

Well I am not the only one wondering about how open the PHP eclipse proposal by Zend is. Some people seem to be getting desperate for information (the guy actually asked this question several times - oddly enough the eclipse news web interface does not list all posts). Others are reacting with sarcasm. Zend however seems to simply put these questions on their ignore filter.

Like I said yesterday I downloaded the IDE and played with it a bit. Note that its quite a hefty download if you go with the "all-in-one" package (so pick your mirror wisely!). But I kinda like software that you just unzip and go.