IllFixItForYou™

An unusual trademark, in that it has never been seen in the wild and it never will be.

This many eyes and codez heard round the world stuff is just cant. Nobody in the Linux “community” has ever offered to fix a single problem in the code. I may be missing some cross-references in the following list, but this is what we get:

• FixItYourself™ — classic hand-washing
• WhyDontYouPaySomeoneToFixIt™ — you pay for beer, don’t you?
• YoureADeveloperYouShouldFixLinux™ — hey, I live in Mom’s basement. I get everything else for free. Why not the use of your time and expertise?
• FixedInNextRelease™ — someone else will do it. Probably.
• BrokenForYourInconvenience™/YouDontNeedThat™ — it doesn’t really need fixing anyway

(There is one, and only one, solution to a hardware problem. Mystified? See FinalSolutionToTheHardwareProblem™.)

In extreme cases such as Bug 326066, you supply one or more possible fixes and are brutally told to go away and stop wasting precious time. “I won’t even implement your fix!”

At no point does anybody ever volunteer to fix the problem. I wonder … is this because they can’t actually program in C and have no idea what they’re talking about?

As a slight rider to that last statement, I should point out that there are two significant classes of problem where you will find a fix proffered on a Linux forum.

The most common one involves some atrocious hack couched (typically) in PHP: LongPHPCodes™ and UseEsotericWorkarounds™. There’s a 50% chance that this will fail straight out of the starting-gate. In the other 50% of cases, it will fail when the next OS update arrives; if not earlier.

A more sophisticated, and correspondingly rarer, case is where the Loon has some faint grasp of what’s going on. The classic example is that of Ubuntu 10.04 buttons. I’ve seen at least five cases where the answer is “you can use gconf-edit to fix that.” Technically it’s still a second person fix rather than a first person fix, but what the heck. Ideally, the Loon will then revert to type and whine that you haven’t explained how to do this on your blog, even though you have. (See Piestar on Lucid Buttons)

Not really much of a “Community,” is it?