Mandrake Linux 9.2 and self-destructing CD-ROM drives
Mandrake Linux 9.2 and self-destructing CD-ROM drives
Posted Oct 31, 2003 18:19 UTC (Fri) by taruntius (guest, #1140)Parent article: Mandrake Linux 9.2 and self-destructing CD-ROM drives
Article says:
Some people have tried to lay the blame there anyway, of course. According to the critics, if MandrakeSoft would only test its releases more thoroughly and avoid including non-standard kernel patches, this sort of episode would not occur. These charges do not hold water, however. Mandrake Linux has, arguably, the most open development process of any commercial distributor; anybody who is interested can follow the evolution of each release from one day to the next and, yes, test those releases. The code in question was included in two 9.2 release candidates, but nobody pointed out the problem. It is hard to see how much better MandrakeSoft could do on the testing front.Agreed, the hardware manufacturer really is to blame here. But even so, I have to disagree with absolving MandrakeSoft on the grounds that their development process is particularly open, and that therefore people could have been testing those bits. I've been mulling that logic over ever since reading this article yesterday, but every way I look at it, it seems to be little more than a fancy way of saying "in the open source world, the burden of testing falls on the user." That, my friends, simply cannot be what we're advocating.
As so many linux advocates will claim, we want linux to have success on the desktop. Success on the desktop equates to success with ordinary users, in which case we cannot seriously be suggesting that those same users be deeply involved in the pre-release testing of their OS. QED: if they were, they wouldn't be ordinary users. And frankly, if I'm an ordinary user and you tell me that with Linux I've got no guarantee that my distro of choice may well not have been tested with my hardware, and that furthermore, it's my fault if something blows up because I could have been testing it in pre-release form, I guarantee you my response is going to be "Well screw that! Windows ain't that bad."
As to the claim of "It is hard to see how much better MandrakeSoft could do on the testing front," you must not be looking very hard. Do you really think it's so much of an undue burden to ask MandrakeSoft, a company that purports to be making a living selling distributions, to do a some compatibility testing with a variety of hardware? Or even to do a lot of compatibility testing? Is it so unthinkable that just maybe they ought to fork over some dollars to buy a few Dell, Gateway, et. al, boxes to see what happens on hardware people are likely to have? Frankly, I think that's entirely reasonable. I don't think that's a particularly high "barrier to entry" for a company like MandrakeSoft. It's true that CD-ROM manufacturers should do a better job of implementing the standards for those devices, but MandrakeSoft, RedHat, and all the other serious commercial distro manufacturers out there, need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for testing their products. That, among many other things, is what it takes to be a credible player in the OS game.
Anyway, that's how I feel about it. But if appeals to responsibility and the plight of the ordinary user don't motivate you, consider this: I'll just bet that somewhere in Redmond there's a big lab where Microsoft tests every random peripheral, CPU, motherboard, and memory stick they can get their hands on to make damn sure this kind of thing doesn't happen to their ordinary users. You want to bet against that?