Anyone noticed a pattern recently?

1. Company releases product or service that is suspiciously incompatible with Linux.
2. (optional) PR rep. and/or customer service agent blames user.
3. Original user’s findings are published, Linux users get angry, blame the company involved and/or Microsoft (sometimes the same).
4. After a few days it turns out that the original report was slightly inaccurate or the problem is quickly fixed.

Hotmail. Microsoft’s online version of Office (accusations). Citibank. Fox News. Foxconn. All of these examples follow this pattern.

This cycle of accusations cannot be good for anyone and is definitely bad for Linux’s reputation. The problem is that some (not all) people jump too quickly to the assumption that there is some sort of conspiracy against Linux. I can’t even really blame these people. At least some of these cases have been acompanied by detailed technical explanation of how Linux is being treated differently and unfairly.

The problem is that Linux is still a very uncommon operating systems, so there is often little or no testing on Linux. This means that Linux is frequently accidentally bundled into a group of unknown systems that are treated differently or else the lack of testing just leaves bugs that affect Linux users in strange ways. Even if there is absolute proof that Linux is being treated differently in a place where it should be treated exactly like Windows, that does not mean that the problem is due to anything more than a bug.

Why is this such a problem? Because it looks bad. It looks like the Linux community as a whole throwing around baseless claims. To clarify: I am not saying the Linux community throws around baseless claims, I am saying that is often what it looks like.

Do you agree, or is it OK to blame the company even if it is just a little bug that gets fixed?