Microsoft's Chief Exec For Latin America Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent' 340
An anonymous reader writes "The President of Microsoft Latin America, in criticizing the Brazilian government for its support of open source software, claimed that declaring something open is how you 'mask incompetence.' That seems especially funny coming from Microsoft, who has used 'closed' to mask incompetence for years. I thought 'open' meant that people could find and fix (or ignore) incompetence, whereas closed meant you were stuck with the incompetence."
not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Open does mean incompetent. Microsoft are trying to hide that by keeping it closed.
I'd rather trust the people saying 'its not perfect so help us make it better'
than the ones saying 'we make perfect software' and being proved wrong time after time.
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Informative)
Everybody hates documentation if you're a coder, but having an attitude of RTFC helps no one if you are looking to compare an OS project to a paid alternative.
I'm not suggesting that this is for all projects, but it is far to common and must change to really enter the mainstream.
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Everybody hates documentation if you're a coder, but having an attitude of RTFC helps no one if you are looking to compare an OS project to a paid alternative.
That's absolutely right, of course it's not the case with all OSS projects but the 'you can find and fix problems' argument is useless if you have to sift through a mountain of undocumented, obfuscated, hacked code just to figure out where the problem is.
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He was probably not refering to anything in particular, just making some FUD.
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Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.
I suspect most people developing commercial products get bored with them by the time they're half-way through, but they have to be shipped in order to keep beer and pizza on the table.
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, there's no conveniently damning repository of abandoned closed source projects - after all, it's not like there's some major website dedicated to hosting them (and how would that even work? "Give us your code but we promise we won't look at it?").
You just plain can't use Sourceforge or freshmeat as an indicator of how often open source projects are abandoned vs closed - using just that data, we have exactly zero information on how often closed source projects are abandoned. I bet you anything that closed source projects get abandoned more often, if only because they're more likely to be started by some PHB than by a dev with fire in his belly.
False. Incompleter projects are valuable. (Score:3, Insightful)
An incomplete project also serves as prior art. Many of those incomplete projects have value, if only to show that some patent troll has been anticipated.
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.
No, not really. We can't browse a large archive of commercial projects that never shipped, so we can't really compare. I am willing to bet that there are more abandoned open source projects, but I don't think it's as skewed as you suggest.
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Insightful)
Except you can't say that each start-up represents a project. Some may represent more than one. Back during the .com boom, many represented none. And what about projects that were transferred to a new company as part of the selling off of a start-up's assets?
So, while yes, one could assume a similar failure rate of start-up companies in software as other areas, that failure rate has absolutely fuck-all to do with the current conversation of comparing open source project abandonment with commercial.
Personally, I think there's more open-source abandoned projects by a huge amount, but mostly for one reason: amateur coder starts a project on own time, realizes it goes beyond current skills, abandons, starts new project later. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, either. It's a great way to learn and push yourself.
My only problem with projects like that is that often it's never clearly established that it's abandoned, or who is in current stewardship, or anything like that, and so these half-done projects remain around, lowering the average quality of OSS, and making it incredibly hard to find something current and/or decent. That's at least one decent thing about commercial software: it's easy to tell who is in charge of a piece of software, and if they're bothering to maintain it any more.
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With all the closed source code we see every day we can judge their competency in documenting their code.
Open source won't advance without others being able to read and modify the code. They must be doing something right if the good packages keep getting better.
Suckwear (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a good sign to me. If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it. You can't really do this if you are writing a commercial product. Usually it just ends up sucking, and clogging up the retail channel with cruddy software. Better to die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money.
Re:Suckwear (Score:5, Insightful)
But I can't count how many times I have yanked the code for an "abandoned" project to see how they did something, or rolled an entire module into something else. Just because the shiny distributable package is no longer useful doesn't mean the project "alive and kicking" somewhere, in some other form.
THAT is one of the key differences for me, open source can be abandoned but it probably won't ever die, closed can easily slip into the night.
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If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it.
Someone has to clean house.
SourceForge is the Island of the Damned.
You can waste an ungodly amount of time there trying to find something alive among the corpses.
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I swear I've worked for that company more than once. In economic theory, failure is considered a virtue. Lack of failure is considered the hallmark of central planning.
It makes no sense to count moribund projects at SF. Many of those projects were started as larks or trial balloons or elliptical treadmills to develop a lusty cranial sixpack.
The serious failures tend to go hand in hand with significant success: Perl, GCC, and PHP hav
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Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Interesting)
"Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through."
You mean like how Outlook 2003 had half-assed, crippled IMAP support that languished for 4 years until Outlook 2007 came out? Which still left out a few important details that were kinda addressed in Outlook 2010? And you got to pay $$$ for each incremental improvement?
I almost like Outlook 2010 but it took them 7 freakin' years to get IMAP right enough not to suck. Actually, it took MORE than 7 years. I'm pretty sure it was part of LookOut 97.
The whole idea that money must be involved to create a quality product really grinds my gears. Back when OpenOffice hit 2.0, one of our mucky-mucks took up the challenge to do all of his office tasks with OO. Several months later, he declared that he hadn't touched an Office product once, the learning curve wasn't bad, and he was able to do everything he needed with OO and several things that Office couldn't do. So we're sticking with M$ Office because it must be better because we pay for it. Sigh. Before I could even open my mouth, he came right out and said that there was no rational basis for the decision. Free software just doesn't feel right.
That attitude is starting to change but it's sooooo sssssllllloooooowwwww in an industry that moves so fast.
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.
I have a project on Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] that I haven't updated since March, and the last update before that was in November. It's not abandoned. To the contrary, I use it in an hourly cron job on a production server. The thing is, it works. Unless a user writes to me with a patch or request, I doubt I'll ever have a reason to update it. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, I haven't experienced a bug in several years, and it compiles without warning on every 32- and 64- bit Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X system I have to test it on.
A lot of projects probably have been abandoned, but it's kind of hard to tell. A lack of updates to a project doesn't have to mean to no one cares. It might also mean that it's, well, finished.
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Yeah this is a totally new concept for people that are used to being on what ever companies upgrade treadmill. I mean in many cases the commercial products been mature for years the only reason THEY come up with updates is they need your money for them to have.
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After looking at your (very well written!) documentation, all I can say is that I'm so very sorry you actally has to write that program. Its mere existence hints at a goldmine of WTFery.
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Heh! Thanks. The "happily ever after" part is that my company's actively working to replace the aging FoxPro project with a PostgreSQL-native version, so the plan is for my work to be obsolete in the near(-ish) future.
The nice part is the feedback I've gotten from users who want to use it for the same reason I do: to migrate their data out of an old proprietary app into a modern database. Almost every version I've released has been due to someone who wrote to me because they had some new variant of Xbase ta
bump the version up (Score:4, Insightful)
if the software is as stable as you mention (and I trust you, if you've been flawlessly using it inproduction),
maybe you should consider bumping the version up to 1.00 and post last update explaining what you said above.
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The spirit of volunteerism is in general a much weaker motivator of people than money.
Many open source projects (and arguably most successful ones) have some sort of corporate sponsorship. Some companies who use open-source projects do pay people to work on them full-time. Others provide support services for open-source products and use the money generated to hire programs to improve the product. Open source vs. Closed source isn't about amateur vs. professional anymore and hasn't been for quite some time.
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My guess is that it shows the level of frustration Microsoft is having with OSS.
OSS is never on the edge of innovation. In fact, it is almost universally behind the times. However, it forces the industry to innovate to survive, which is great for technology as a whole.
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Informative)
1 June 2001, Ballmer's legendary comment, "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works." [linux.org]
From the comments in TFA, 8 April 2002 - FUD from Juan Gonzalez, General Manager of Microsoft Peru gets shot down in flames by Congressman Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez [gnuwin.epfl.ch]
20 February 2003, David Stutz, retiring group program manager, "delivered a kick in the pants to his former employer" saying "Microsoft is in danger of being swept away by open source" [cnn.com]
12 May 2004, Windows Template Library (and Windows Installer XML) posted to sourceforge [eweek.com]. The blogosphere reels in shock [hanselman.com]. Even slashdot [slashdot.org] isn't sure what to think.
I got bored at this point, but there's lots more popcorn-hour fun and games as this large corporation tries to deal with a rapidly changing industry.
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TCP/IP stack and SMTP server were written with department of defense funding.
The first web server and browser were funded as a project by CERN
The first Kerberos implementation was closed source developed at MIT
The first NFS was written by Sun Microsystems.
Do you have any other examples of innovative OSS projects?
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Insightful)
On that note, let's follow the trail
open source = incompetence
BSD Sockets = open source
Winsock (windows sockets - the TCP/IP stack Microsoft first used in Windows) = BSD Sockets, taken directly from BSD code (Microsoft loves the BSD license)
Winsock = incompetence, ergo Windows networking = the product of incompetence!!
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
This *IS* Microsoft with a thesis. It's also a sales guy that's losing ground, just as has happened in many countries of the world. He's losing his grip. There's little way for Microsoft to make a PR coup out of this, which makes me wonder why you'd even bring this up.
IMHO, Microsoft's embrace of 'open' is similar to the other embraces that they've made, called The Black Widow Effect. It goes back to things like SQL Server, OS/2-LAN Manager, and other 'partnered' programs that turned into outrageous divorces with big name organizations.
Microsoft serves Microsoft. Make no mistake about this. If it's not invented here, then it needs to be embraced and squeezed to death.
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Let me fix it for you:
If it's not invented here, then it needs to be bought out so we can claim we invented it. Or embraced and squeezed to death.
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The man's tasked with selling to Latin America. Don't you think all of Latin America knows how to take this guy? I'm sure now he seems more incompetent than Open Source to them, and probably more or less impotent.
Open after all (Score:2)
http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/ [microsoft.com]
Wow. I guess Microsoft is open after all.
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Is it merely coincidence or are they simply altering their current status of "Embracing s/Openness/Incompetence/"?
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Damn, that site is lame. They released 20,000 lines of code because if they didn't they'd have been sued.
Is it opposite day in Latin America? (Score:5, Insightful)
The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?
Maybe... (Score:2)
They've instituted an In Soviet Russia Day or something over there?
I mean this is some Orwellian "War is peace, freedom is slavery" shit right there.
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"Why are you open sourcing your code? Are you incompetent or something?"
"Oh no, it's just very comfortable. I think we'll all be open sourcing code in the future."
Lost in (Score:2)
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What the hell kind of "My hovercraft is full of eels" translation is that? Anybody have what he really said?
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He said:
"Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência".
from:
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/tec/798606-microsoft-critica-posicao-do-governo-brasileiro-sobre-o-software-livre.shtml [uol.com.br]
linked from:
http://lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=10523.0 [freepascal.org]
which was linked from TFA.
Re:Lost in (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lost in (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lost in (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like he is being taken out of context.
For example, I've noticed a common theme lately for old, entrenched products. If they start to fall behind and their market share starts to dip too low, they open source their code. This generates lots of good press and a whole new army of free worker bees improving your product. The down side, of course, is you lose complete control, but if you've been screwing it up this whole time that might not be a bad thing.
Probably the biggest example of this is Mozilla, which came as a direct result of the disaster that was Netscape's "upgrade" (they took a fantastic product and killed it with incompetence).
So he's not necessarily saying open source = incompetent, what he is saying is that often the reason companies open source their code is as a way to mask their own incompetence (i.e. not the open source community's incompetence).
It seems plausible.
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What does that mean in English?
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Spanish and Portuguese are substantially similar. Speaking competent Spanish is generally enough to understand the basic idea of written Portuguese. Speaking as one who speaks passable Spanish, his translation looks pretty spot on. In Spanish it would just be:
Cuando no puedes competir, tu lo declaras abierto. Eso mascaras tu incompetencia.
I leave finding the similarities as an exercise to the reader.
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It needs to be put in context. What he meant was: when a company cannot compete (inferior product), they scream at the top of their lungs BUT IT'S OPEN! in order to masquerade their incompetence. He may have a point.
However, and I'd be preaching to the choir, we all know that it doesn't also mean that when a company has an "open" product, it sucks by default. He may have tried to pull this false correlation.
He also said in an earlier paragraph that the Brazillian government is wasting time with open-source,
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As a native portuguese speacker, well, that article is quite funny. Some translations (without much context, since the article is mainly composed of small out of context paragraphs, I stopped reading Folha de São Paulo because it had a very bad journalism...)
"Innovation in software ins't made by governements, but by the private sector" - From the article, he said that after being questioned about the
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Lingua latina mortua est? Ego hoc nescivi, tibi gratias ago! Nunc debeo eam oblivisci.
Incompetent? (Score:5, Funny)
Open means Incompetent?
That can't be right. I thought it meant not quite finished and don't expect documentation.
Put the flame throwers down... it's a joke.
Re:Incompetent? (Score:5, Funny)
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Yep, they sure love open source (Score:2)
It didn't take very long after their recent proclamation [networkworld.com]
"open" means MS sends an incompetent (Score:2)
so, theoretically, the dimbulb exec is partially correct. and MS will fix the problem by shifting this incompetent exec to someplace where he can't do any damage. like maybe mobile, or Vista phone support.
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That's the pot calling the kettle black (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's the pot calling the kettle black (Score:5, Funny)
That the pot calling the kettle black if ever I've heard it!
Thank God. I don't know what we would have done if you hadn't shown up, Captain Obvious.
Why editorialize the article? (Score:3, Insightful)
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1) You say that like it's a bad thing.
2) Well yeah, what's your point?
3) You must be new here.
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Maybe he's on to something (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML [wikipedia.org]
Agite (Score:2)
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Causation or Correlation (Score:2)
Getting confused here. Is it causation or correlation? Does incompetent imply open?
Stephan
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But I'm alright with MS making nonsensical claims to keep users. OSS is gaining users every day and if microsoft is willing to act as a fools magnet, it will mean that we will only get the most competent users, that usually helps development.
The giant writhes (Score:2)
Declaring FOSS "unAmerican" is how Monoposoft used to mask its own incompetence.
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Where "unAmerican" is shorthand for "unLatinAmerican". ;-)
If you ever want to get into an argument with someone from South America, use the word "America" when you mean "the United States".
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They've since moved on to other ways of masking their incompetence, which are mostly the old ways wrapped in a new super-secure API.
Anyway, there are a few ways to read this statement:
I dare MS to show their competence by releasing all their source code.
The key word is "compete" (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic truth is when companies are forced to provide superior products instead of costly attempts, citizens win. Neither the government nor it's people are here to compete with you, that's a business game.
Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant (Score:5, Insightful)
Open doesn't necessarily mean incompetent and closed doesn't necessarily mean competant. But "open" can sometimes be a last refuge for the incompetent. As if no one who has ever banged into a serious, irrefutable FLOSS usability problem has been told "quit whining, learn how to code and fix it yourself. It's open!"
You remember all those PDA's that the Taiwanese/Japanese couldn't sell because they sucked so much and their last ditch strategy was to bill them as open source PDA's and create FLOSS projects around them (e.g. Zaurus)? Open sourcing of Symbian after it got its ass handed to it by iOS? That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.
Re:Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant (Score:5, Insightful)
But releasing the shitty software as OSS could potentially solve those problems for you. Bug hunting is easier for sure. You don't have to deal with minor patches really. And if the software is valuable the group can figure it out for you
Lost in Translation (Score:2, Informative)
Amazing... and a reminder (Score:2)
Guess he didn't hear the current party line.... and I think nossos amigos portuguêses would appreciate the appropriate choice of language for the department.
Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
This was exactly what latin american free software needed. FSF - LA [fsfla.org] successfully "converted" many Brazilian trade unions to Free Software. Uruguay adopted Linux for OLPC, Argentina was going to adopt Linux but then Ballmer paid a visit to the president and now they use dual-boot. Ubuntu is already more popular than Mac, and Microsoft is the paradigm of "colonialist foreign corporation" that all the leftists despise. (See this article [venezuela.net.ve] (spanish) from Venezuela: "Free Software vs. Privative Software: freedom vs. slavery")
I recall the last time Stallman visited Argentina, he spent more time with politicians than with programmers. I really hope this is our chance. OLPC is like Gramsci: if the kids learn linux there's no way to bring them to Windows once they grow up.
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I recall the last time Stallman visited Argentina, he spent more time with politicians than with programmers.
Wow. We've had some bad diplomats in the past but... wow. The cake has been taken.
EULA (Score:4, Insightful)
If closed-source is so competent, why does every EULA I ever read disclaim any warranty?
That's not what the guy said (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know Spanish, so I had to go with the translation [freepascal.org] (which, by the way, is 2 links away from TFS - why not link to it directly?). Here's what the guy actually said:
The executive, however, said that the two models - open source and closed - will continue to coexist.
Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence."
The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit."
It's fairly clear from this that he is not saying that "open means incompetent" here, but rather than some "incompetent" companies that shall remain un-named *cough* are playing the "openness" card to mask their deficiencies in other departments. Which is quite a different thing.
There are other things in that (translated) speech that could be picked apart in typical /. fashion, which might even make a decent article. But, it seems, the chase for flamebaiting headlines stimulates editors' imagination yet again...
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Can you give a sane translation of this? I used Google Translate, and was rewarded with this semi-incoherent thing:
"The only problem is that when you develop basándote only 'free software' you have to free products and it is very difficult to run a business that way," Rincon said
which, insofar as I can parse it, seems to say that "if you're developing free software, you'll have to give it out for free" - which, while a gross oversimplification that is provably untrue for several known cases (e.g. RedHa
Mindless MS bashing misses translation, news at 11 (Score:2, Insightful)
It looks as though some mindless MS hating monkey submitted another summary with the actual article being 2 links away from the "source". The sentence finished with:
The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit. "
I think that's a pretty fair statement. The article headline appears to be badly translated; it looks as though he is saying that the company is incompetent when they are declaring themselves open in an effort to explain why they are not completing in the market (i.e. 'our product may not be better than yours, but its open'). In the interest of
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Anyone remember? (Score:4, Informative)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/09/01/0019238/Why-Microsoft-Is-Being-Nicer-To-Open-Source [slashdot.org]
Why do we take this stuff seriously? It's not a strategy or plan until it's coherent and on purpose. That's why I disliked the above story in the first place. It would behoove a great many of us (including myself, in many circumstances) to remember to look twice before jumping in with our opinion on this kind of thing.
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Installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition and my wired and wireless connections worked out of the box. No he doesn't have a point.
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I bought a pair of open-toed sandals but only one of them fell apart so you're both wrong!
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You should know this if you're here but I should remind you that bluescreens are usually a sign of hardware problems.
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Or at the very least a rogue driver of some sort (doesn't have to be attached to any hardware).
Vista was pretty rough on vendors, and broke a lot of drivers that used to work, which is not cool in my mind. 7 is much, much better about this, and I've never experienced a problem in windows like the one I had trying to get audio to work in two separate media packages that decided they each wanted to use their own scheme. Ugh. I'll take a bluescreen once every six months over that any day.
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Guess you didn't try to see if your device was set to activate on boot.
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Amazingly quick fix. Sounds like those guys were doing a good job. Tiny change and it worked.
My last two wireless issues on Windows based laptops took me hours to fix. My job is to repair computers and I have done so for 25 years or so.
I think your solution is fantastic. I can't imagine what you would have done if you had to figure out those types of issues by yourself.
And, this isn't the first time in the past week that someone's said that Fedora 13 was not to their liking.
Re:Fedora 13 (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, did a factory restore of a Dell with Windows XP and it wouldn't boot with the Nvidia card that came with it. Had to take the card out, do the restore, then install the latest drivers and then put the card back in. Considering that everything is made and tested for Windows that's just sad.
Recently did the same with an Acer. Acer drivers wouldn't detect the broadcom wireless, because it has to be initialized by the driver, but the drivers won't install if they don't detect. Had to install the drivers from Dell's site.
So no, the guy doesn't have a point and neither does your anecdote.
You could make the argument that many hardware companies do not support OSS but you can hardly make the argument that OSS is incompetent.
Now if you consider that almost all hardware is specifically designed for proprietary software and it still doesn't work all of the time, one could make the argument that proprietary software is incompetent.
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I'm running Ubuntu these days, but I'm *still* out of bourbon.
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same here, especially that adobe flash stuff... ohh and some sort of window manager made by some small company based in Washington state.
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More like War = Tomato
I've seen a lot of competent closed source applications, and a lot of incompetent open source solutions.
Your particular ideology doesn't dictate when, how, or why your executable will crash.