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Don't Blame Microsoft
Anyone noticed a pattern recently?
- Company releases product or service that is suspiciously incompatible with Linux.
- (optional) PR rep. and/or customer service agent blames user.
- Original user’s findings are published, Linux users get angry, blame the company involved and/or Microsoft (sometimes the same).
- 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?
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>I wish the community would calm down
Who is this community you speak of?
14 year old Ubuntu fanbois who just discovered Linux and whose only examples of interaction are the rabid Mac fanbois, gamers and their own quirks or GNU-Linux developers like Linus, Miguel and others who we laud for their lack of manners or civility?
They speak for me as much as the Ubuntu using rapist or Suse using child molester.
Our community is full of bad role models so lets not be surprised when newbies think that this is the way to behave.
Next time you chuckle at some Torvalds diss and say “That’s Linus being Linus.”, please remember this community stuff.
People take their leads from leaders whose words impact whole communities.
Blaming unknown users is easy. Having the courage to call out the visible ones is much harder.
What petey from Pretoria wrote in some comment is less representative of the community than a head developer comparing security experts to masturbating monkeys.
I agree. I wish the community would calm down sometimes. Companies generally want to do the right thing by their users and simply don’t realize Linux is as big as it is. Lets inform them in a polite way.