On Public Bug Trackers
Decisions about what to work on — and when, and by whom — are complicated. From the outside it might look like it’s as simple as picking the next feature request with the most votes, but it’s not that simple.
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But if you have a public bug tracker, you’d likely find that you’re having to explain your decisions all the time. You’d be constantly defending your plans to people who remind you that Feature X has all these votes, so why hasn’t it shipped yet?
Sadly, this is just as true for open-source software projects as for commercial ones, but there’s no way around it in an open-source case (there are, of course, some ways to ameliorate the effects). But at least now you can point everyone to Simmons’s list of reasons why you might not be working on that thing they’re interested in, instead of having to type out the reason(s) yourself ☺︎
