Today’s big story seems to be a piece of code in a Foxconn motherboard that checks what the operating system is and, based on that information, uses a different piece of code for each OS. Unfortunately, the code for Linux seems to cause some major errors, due to an allegedly incorrect implementation of the ACPI standards, as best I understand it. The news was first broken, I believe, at the Ubuntu Forums by someone who went out of their way to decompile the motherboard code causing the errors, just so they could track down the problem.

This, and other similar stories, are interesting, because they can be viewed in two ways. On one hand, it is easy to see them as a malicious attack on a specific piece of software. On the other hand, I suspect that the real problem is one of the developers not bothering to really test their software on systems such as Linux. My belief is that these issues are not at all malicious, just a mistake that no one bothered to look for. The good news is that developers will probably learn soon that these mistakes lead to bad situations.

The problem for the software creators is that people who use niche operating systems, browsers, or other software tend to be the kind of person who would decompile a bunch of complicated code and track down the issue. Quite often, these tech savvy people also know how to get a lot of attention. All of this together means a PR nightmare. Eventually, companies will realize that any money “saved” by ignoring a particular platform is likely to end up costing them more than they “saved” due to the PR issues it is highly likely to create. Hopefully, these sorts of issues will go away at that point.

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