It's not specific to software. The general issue is that the indirect costs of a product are not supported by the company that created it. I explain: a compan

It's not specific to software. The general issue is that the indirect costs of a product are not supported by the company that created it. I explain: a company could generally earn more money by releasing new software (or features) than by fixing bugs, even if its users spend more time and money because of these bugs than it would cost to fix them. We can see it everywhere: - unhealthy foods generating long-term medical care costs - short life products generating cost of buying new ones quickly (built-in obsolescence) - cheap electricity generating thousands of years of waste management - etc If we find ways to make these indirect costs absorbed, we could improve software quality. Ideas: - for proprietary software, include a kind of warranty to fix bugs when enough users ask for it (similarly to getsatisfaction.com) - for opensource software, I think of getsatisfaction.com coupled with a donation system to encourage people to fix popular requests What do you think?