111–120 of 139 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How else is that supposed to work? You either fix a driver in the kernel or a driver outside the kernel, it's not going to make that big of a difference to the person who has to fix it.
The difference is that the end user doesn't have to do it. Someone else is going to do it. Just like it is on Windows.
I wish there was an actual thriving business model like this -- just fixing most annoying bugs, for a price, of commonly used desktop software. Why proprietary software companies cannot or do not want to provide this service is over me. Perhaps I'm too much used to consulting.
Well, if one person spent a month on this, they’d be making about $10/hr. Makes StarBucks barista pay look good… Of course, if they can churn this out closer to 2 days, maybe there is something there. Such a talented person would probably prefer a more certain and higher income.
Also, Lenovo Legion Pro 7* are not cheap (not that this would have been justified for cheap laptops).
Shame on Lenovo/ who should have fixed this years ago.
I wish there was an actual thriving business model like this -- just fixing most annoying bugs, for a price, of commonly used desktop software. Why proprietary software companies cannot or do not want to provide this service is over me. Perhaps I'm too much used to consulting.
I wish there was an actual thriving business model like this -- just fixing most annoying bugs, for a price, of commonly used desktop software. Why proprietary software companies cannot or do not want to provide this service is over me. Perhaps I'm too much used to consulting.
Well, this would imply broken software. You already payed for the software, now you are required to pay to get bugs fixed? Bad optics, although not beyond contemporary sentiments... Inherently shady incentives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
This kinda only works best for FOSS, incentivizing external devs IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? In much of the world, working on one of those a month would provide a comfortable living.
This $1900 bug bounty is quite an outlier, you generally won’t find one per month. An additional challenge is that it’s hard to predict how much work something will take, or whether there are any showstoppers. Also, if you don’t live in the same country as the client, it will be more difficult to get legal assurance that you’ll receive your money (or for the client that they won’t lose their money).
Which is, in order for some rando to fix the bug; a company would need to give access to their codebase to some rando.
And they don't wanna do that.
I wish there was an actual thriving business model like this -- just fixing most annoying bugs, for a price, of commonly used desktop software. Why proprietary software companies cannot or do not want to provide this service is over me. Perhaps I'm too much used to consulting.
For small stuff, the cost is just going to be too much for people to want to pay it. This bug had a $1900 bounty attached. Let's put the cost of one software engineer (salary plus overheads) at $200,000 a year, which I think is an underestimate. That's $3850 a week, so unless your bug can definitely be fixed (including getting any necessary hardware, investigation, fixing, code review overhead, etc) in two or three d…
If there's some Lenovo EU rep with enough budget for their department, this person should really be contracted to fix the audio from their laptops one by one. This seemed to take 2 weeks with a dedicated person and remote access but debugging with access to the device could be much faster!
Outsourcing this work to outside developers on the regular probably would make the media claim something like "Lenovo is too lazy to pay their people to make their speakers work so they make strangers on the internet do it instead" which isn't half false.
It'd probably be better and cheaper if they'd just hire someone to make their speakers work on Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For many large companies or even teams, there exists a class of bugs / issues / features where dropping 5-10k on a bounty is extremely cost efficient compared to working around the issue or internal development. That might not fund development outright, but at worst it would point out the features people want and serve to inform what to work on next. I think there are a couple reasons why that is not prevalent. Most…
I’m confused. Bounties for security holes make sense because you don’t need to submit the patch, just find the hole. And bounties for open source (like in this case) also make sense because you have everything you need to submit a patch. But for everything else (like big tech, startups, and so on) bounties can’t fix bugs because even if I find a bug, how am I going to patch it without access to the source code? How c…
In all of those cases users/players were able to fix bugs and add desired functionality (mostly) independently, on a closed-source program.
For industrial software you don't see as much, even though arguably cracks (to skip license check) qualify here.