Bill Gates talks directly with the public about Vista problems

Wait — sorry, no. My mistake.

Yeah, sorry about the title. I’m in a particularly snide mood at the moment. What prompted this, in-part, is a post I came across somewhere linking me to this bug report over at the Fedora bugtracker; nothing out of the ordinary, just a simple problem with Flash and Youtube videos, right?

Actually, if you read carefully, you’ll see that the person who submitted the bug is none other than Linus Torvalds, the initial creator and current project co-ordinator of Linux kernel development. In short, you might compare him — in a sense — to Bill Gates. The major difference being that Linus participates in open discussion of bugs and issues regarding his development project, whereas Bill prefers to send out his chair throwing , hot-headed chief executive officers to do his dirty work.

I find the bugtracker report to be interesting because you don’t often see the lead developer / project manager of any closed-source development actively participating in public discussion of software bugs. While it may be argued that Linus has nothing to do with playing Flash in Linux, the point remains that he personally took the time to log, report and assist in the fixing of the bug. It’s a testament to the transparency of the open-source development philosophy, and I think personally, quite an achievement.