And that's when the testing starts.

No, this is only how OS people think the process works. What happens in the real world is more complicated.

Generally bugs are only fixed sometimes, because fixing bugs is tedious and uninteresting, and a lot less fun than adding Cool New Stuff. So in practice most desktop projects and some of the core Linux variants end up in a kind of homeostatic limbo, caught between half-hearted bug fixing and the constant developer need to hobby-code.

Beyond having a much larger testing team, there's a further advantage of the communal development/testing process: debugging and improving goes on even after the application has reached maturity.

Except that on the desktop, very few projects ever do reach maturity. There is a lot of abandonware where developers simply get bored with maintenance, and a lot of sort-of-not-quite-there coding which works in a limited way.

I'm on a couple of developer lists so I'm not unaware of how the process works.

The word Community leads us to the ideological background that was behind the genesis of Open Source with Richard Stallman's GNU Manifesto.

Stallman doesn't actually support Open Source - like all good authoritarians he wants other people's freedom to be on his own (virally GPL'd) terms.

It is no secret that I and most folk here at ET identify ourselves with this kind of e-Socialism.

Open Source is not e-Socialism - except in a very limited and dilettante-ish sense.

OS is more like mechanics getting together and telling everyone that because it's possible for anyone to build their own car everyone should, and hey, did we mention that we're not Chrysler and GM but look at our cool car designs anyway because they're at least as good, really they are.

Mechanics can be good and useful, but not everyone needs to be a mechanic.

OS may be anarchist, in a limited way, but it's certainly not socialist - I don't think anyone who understands what socialism is would make that claim.

And in fact, not a few developers seem to be libertarian capitalist types.

I'd be more convinced by this kind of e-socialism if the OS community as a whole spent more time teaching computing skills in low income areas or organising charity PC donations - practical things to help people from other economic demographics.

I'm sure some developers do that, but it doesn't quite seem to be a key feature of the open source project.