NB#666: My eyes hurt. About Nokia internal bugtracker.

Even if this is old news, after seeing the message of the last MeeGoTouch framework release in the mailing list, I wanted to write this post.

If you read the message, there are some keys before the description of the fixed bugs, for example, NB#190995. For the people not following the Nokia scene, these codes mean that the bug report is from the Nokia internal bugtracker, which is not public. Nokia uses a private bugtracker to handle bugs for open source projects.

My main concern about this is the fear that something similar to what happened with Maemo in the past happens now in MeeGo. The story is quite simple:

• Nokia announce Maemo and opens a public bugzilla at maemo.org
• 10 Nokia developers/architects (well, it isn’t the exact number) use the public bugzilla, the rest use the private bugtracker.
• The community feels that they’re spending the time talking to a wall, and report a bug so that developers become more involved in the public bugzilla and a true collaboration happens.
• This bug report is still open after more than four years. Of course, most developers weren’t never involved in the public bugzilla.
• Maemo Community members aren’t happy with Nokia.

I fully understand that Nokia uses an internal bugtracker for closed software or software that hasn’t been revealed yet, but I can not understand how they use the internal bugtracker for things like MeeGoTouch which is developed openly (or not?).

Robin already asked the reasons, and even wrote a bugreport in meego.com. But there isn’t any good excuse for this, an open project should be discussed openly (MeeGoTouch is) and the bugs should be managed openly too.

Meego is in a very early period of development, and of course we must be patient and give it time, but it is better to do things right from the start because if not it will be much more difficult to change later.