Item — HN Reader

The biggest problem I see here is that many companies keep their bug-lists to themselves, and actively do not wish to publish them in an externally visible fashion.

Open source projects benefit from having a public bug-tracker, but commercial entities like to pretend their software is bug-free and so they do not.

I wish you luck.

1 comments

I agree with the fact that businesses don't like to publish - but if such community is built the businesses will be benefited more than everyone.

Are you sure about that? It seems that businesses wanting this is both crucial to the idea, but also unproven. For example, consider two very close competitors in the widget-making market, A and B. If A adds this, then:

1) They might get better bug reports and be able to fix them better, giving a less buggy product and making them better than B - good for A

2) A user reviewing both A and B might see that A has a list of bugs, and (most likely mistakenly)assume since B doesn't have such a list that B has no bugs. They assume B is better - bad for A

I suspect it depends on a lot of other factors which of those results is more pronounced, but it is unproven which way it would go for any given business.