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$1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

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Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#71

Post by inopinatus »

dahcryn wrote: post #55
fragmede wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet, Microsoft Teams is a total trash fire full of bugs that users hate. So something is broken (Teams. It's Teams that is busted).

it's the management structure that's broken. Plenty of decent engineers around microsoft who could fix it, plenty of customer and enterprises willing to pay, but they are not allowed to work on it because of prioritization bullshit, allegedly they could get more money elsewhere That's literally the issue, management by KPI frameworks

There is also a matter of selective effort by staff senior enough to make their own choices. Many SDE3 (or whatever MS equivalent is) wouldn’t want to be associated with a dumpster fire product like Teams.

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#72

Post by nightshift1 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #38
layer8 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that “fixing this issue required weeks of intensive work from multiple people”, the price would have to be prohibitively high. More generally, software is really, really expensive to produce and maintain. The economics only work at scale, in particular for B2C. (Maybe AI will change that, if it becomes more reliable.)

Eh, I think you're underestimating some people perseverance. You generally only need multiple people for timely action, and it usually even slows you down (from the perspective of total hours spent) Like 2k bug bounty? I guarantee you some people would be willing to spend a lot of time for that. But yeah, people which are gainfully employed and have a decent salary - likely not.

lt could become some sort of leetcode final boss and/or something that you can put on your resume.

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#73

Post by zozbot234 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #70
zozbot234 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some device classes can be supported in userspace because no matter how an adversarial driver might get the device to misbehave, it cannot possibly break the kernel's security model. This might even apply to some audio devices, depending on how exactly they're hooked up to the rest of your system. But the more typical devices, especially those in your average SoC and those connected to a PCIe bus or the like, have fu…

Kernel modules absolutely run in kernel space though. I’ve literally written kernel modules for high speed networking devices that have full access to the memory bus and enumerate pci devices. There’s no userspace or kernel space question here. It’s merely a matter of someone turning this into an easily installable kernel module

Kernel modules are not going to be "easily installable" anyway because their whole purpose is to poke at kernel-internal structures that will change all the time as the kernel evolves. With source code, you'll hopefully get notified if there is breakage - the module fails to build and you need to forward-port it to the current kernel.

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#74

Post by 29athrowaway »

layer8 wrote: post #22
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #10

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.

Given that “fixing this issue required weeks of intensive work from multiple people”, the price would have to be prohibitively high. More generally, software is really, really expensive to produce and maintain. The economics only work at scale, in particular for B2C. (Maybe AI will change that, if it becomes more reliable.)

And also scarce skills.

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#75

Post by tstrimple »

jusssi wrote: post #32
pm215 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$200k is one expensive software engineer. On average, you can get people to work for much less.

Paying for software developers is really weird. State governments for example struggle to pay for a FTE that makes $140k. But they can pay me over $200/hour for consulting services for multiple years. The technical FTE employees that they have generally aren't qualified to evaluate their consulting needs so you get multi-million dollar contracts with very little actual oversight. I was really impressed with the folks I was working with at this particular state government and looked into what it would look like if I joined them full time as a FTE technology leader. I would have to take almost a 50% pay cut. The top senior IT position that oversees all of the state resources makes 70% of what I do. It's crazy. Unless you're working in medicine or sports, government pay sucks.

I've seen similar but less extreme examples play out in the private sector. 16 year senior architect making less than freshly hired software dev that was just an intern within the same company. Software developer pay is largely based on what you're demanding. In a lot of companies, there is a wide range of pay for folks doing literally the same job. They will hire a dev at $180k because that dev wouldn't go lower and turn around and push back to get another dev at $120k for the same level of unproven experience.

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#76

Post by firesteelrain »

fragmede wrote: post #25
1970-01-01 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you realize that you didn't include 'open source' in your statement? This is exactly what the desktop OS makers -Microsoft and Apple- do every single day. Their prices are mostly B2B and therefore hidden, but there is a steady income for each person involved in making the fix.

and yet, Microsoft Teams is a total trash fire full of bugs that users hate. So something is broken (Teams. It's Teams that is busted).

I have used it every day for past 3-4 years. What bugs? I don’t love it but I don’t hate it either. I don’t understand the Teams hate

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#77

Post by drunner »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #10

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 regulation that you have to sell and maintain a working product, so that open source devs don't have to waste their time fixing proprietary products.

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#78

Post by FridayoLeary »

fragmede wrote: post #25
1970-01-01 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you realize that you didn't include 'open source' in your statement? This is exactly what the desktop OS makers -Microsoft and Apple- do every single day. Their prices are mostly B2B and therefore hidden, but there is a steady income for each person involved in making the fix.

and yet, Microsoft Teams is a total trash fire full of bugs that users hate. So something is broken (Teams. It's Teams that is busted).

If you had made the same complaint about Win11 and you wouldn't be so far off. Microsoft is great at driver support which is the subject at hand.

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#79

Post by nickff »

drunner wrote: post #77
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #10

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 regulation that you have to sell and maintain a working product, so that open source devs don't have to waste their time fixing proprietary products.

It looks like these laptops are usually sold with Windows; are you saying that every manufacturer should be obligated to develop drivers for every software which is theoretically compatible with it? Or are you just saying that we need even more caveats in the interminable EULAs we all just click through?

Re: $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

#80

Post by espdev »

There is a common problem with Realtek ALC3306 on Linux (Kernel Bug 213159). This affects many Lenovo laptop models. For example, my fairly old Legion S7 15IMH5 laptop also does not work.

I'm not willing to pay $1000 for a fix (it's easier for me to buy a new laptop that will work with Linux), but $100 is probably okay. :)

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