Voting for Bugs in Firefox
Paper presented at FLOSS Workshop 2010 and in an earlier version at OSS 2010
13 Pages Posted: 26 Nov 2010
Date Written: July 1, 2010
Abstract
In this paper, we present preliminary evidence suggesting that the voting mechanism implemented by the open-source Firefox community is a means to provide a supplementary voice to mainstream users. This evidence is drawn from a sample of bug-reports and from information on voters both found within the bug-tracking system (Bugzilla) for Firefox. Although voting is known to be a relatively common feature within the governance structure of many open-source communities, our paper suggests that it also plays a role as a bridge between the mainstream users in the periphery of the community and developers at the core.
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