Ton's of update for 14.04

[Guest docbop]

I finallly updated to 14.04 a week or so ago and really surprise at the number of updates coming daily. I worked in commerical software for a long time so seeing this makes me wonder who's setting the target release dates.

 

Back in early days of software the relase schedule and most things were driven and controlled by the engineering/software dev team. So things were fairly realistic and they weren't afraid to kick out a release date if necessary.

 

Well as time went on and control of the schedule transfered to Marketing team. Marketing started basing schedules on trade shows, seasons, and competiton. They were agressive, but they did understand if something really wasn't ready the bad press it would create and they didn't want to deal with that.

 

Then disaster hit and suddenly the bean-counter (Finance dept) got control of schedules. Everything became about when the numbers had to hit the books in order to make the company look good. Yes the stories are true, if we "offically" ship on this date the pre-sales goes into this quarter so stock looks good. That mean a date was set and no matter what condition a product was in it shipped. They didn't care about the bad press and support nightmare created. One big name company I worked for shipped with over 1000 known bugs twice because of this. Another I worked for shipped with 5000 know bugs. What was funny a couple times because of the delay between manufacturing and shipping to stores, accidently patches were put up on our website for a product that wasn't even in the stores yets. Opp's got to pull those down.

 

That gives you an idea why with FOSS like Ubuntu why something is released before its ready. Yes, there will alway be bugs that's life, no program over 1000 lines of code doesn't have a bug lurking somewhere, but so many fixes.

 

Just saying why can't Ubuntu's schedule slip if necessary?

 

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