NewsForge: The CVS Cop-Out and the Stranded User

“One of my biggest pet peeves with open source software is what
I call the CVS cop-out. It works like this: I criticize
(accurately) some shortcoming of an open source application either
in an article or in conversation, and someone responds with,
‘That’s not true! That feature was fixed in CVS four weeks
ago!’

“Or words to that effect. As if that makes the bug that I want
to talk about a non-issue. As if it is inaccurate to discuss a bug
in the shipping version of an app just because there’s a fix in
beta, alpha, CVS, or patched on the developer’s mailing list. It is
a developer-centric perspective, unhelpful to the user…”

Complete
Story