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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

#91

Post by Avamander »

zozbot234 wrote: post #63
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #61

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…

Most larger companies would probably find it way easier and more sensible to contract with some outside consultancy to work on these issues than just posting a random bounty, even if the latter might potentially be cheaper. See Google Summer of Code projects for a very practical example of how "just pay randos to work on issue X for cheap" can quite often end up in failure.

> See Google Summer of Code projects for a very practical example of how "just pay randos to work on issue X for cheap" can quite often end up in failure.

That potential for failure is there for any "subcontractors". I wonder if anyone has any stats on this.

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

#92

Post by toast0 »

espdev wrote: post #80

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. :)

$100 gets you a usb sound card and $90 for something else. It's not a good solution, but it's easy.

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

#93

Post by fooker »

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).

The economics for something like MS teams is not what you'd expect.

It has to be good enough that other options are not worth the hassle to switch over to, for enterprise customers. The quality doesn't matter in the slightest, because making it 5-10% better would cost double or triple.

Where quality does matter for these customers, backward compatibility, Microsoft does pretty well.

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

#94

Post by fooker »

firesteelrain wrote: post #76
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).

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

Most recently I had it put meetings on a different day because something was broken with it's outlook integration w.r.t starting the week on a Sunday vs Monday.

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

#95

Post by jaredklewis »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #61
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.)

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 can someone submit a patch to Netflix or whatever?

IME your average SV startup has a long list of bugs they are aware of, but just haven’t gotten around to fixing because other priorities are in the way. But people can’t help patch unless you have an open development process.

Am I missing something?

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

#97

Post by mlrtime »

tstrimple wrote: post #75
jusssi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

They give up pay for guaranteed work and benefits, maybe a pension? Most likely little risk of being fired or laid off.

You have to keep finding clients (I'm sure it's easy now, will it always?) and pay all your expenses.

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

#98

Post by trelane »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #64
1970-01-01 wrote: post #21

Patching up the kernel to get some sound coming out of the speakers.. Very on brand for Linux.

I agree. I can’t see any reason this couldn’t be packaged as a prebuilt kernel module so end users can trivially install it. The instructions and code here can be used to build the kernel module. I don’t have this laptop but have built kernel modules in the past to give context. It’s a tiny step to publish this as a kernel module so end users can trivially install this (this reduces the instructions to downloading on…

> I can’t see any reason this couldn’t be packaged as a prebuilt kernel module so end users can trivially install it.

I don't think you have to be the original developer to create packages one can distribute. Go for it!

From TFA:

> This guide is currently for Linux kernel version 6.17.8. It will be updated for future kernel versions as they are released, until the fix is fully integrated into the kernel.

So it sounds like the plan is to get it into the mainline kernel, at which point it will get to all the distributions. So I sent see the problem here.

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

#99

Post by wslh »

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.)

While you are completely correct about the bounty price, sometimes there are people who work deeply in the field and can solve those things relatively fast because they have already done similar things in the past.

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

#100

Post by jokowueu »

phoe-krk wrote: post #4
jokowueu wrote: post #3

Oh it's written by Nadim Kobeissi, such a huge fan of his work didn't expect him see him here

In the README: > Approximately 95% of the engineering work was done by Lyapsus. Lyapsus improved an incomplete kernel driver, wrote new kernel codecs and side-codecs, and contributed much more. I want to emphasize his incredible kindness and dedication to solving this issue. He is the primary force behind this fix, and without him, it would never have been possible. > I (Nadim Kobeissi) conducted the initial investig…

I didn't mean he wrote the fix but the read me instead, looking back at my comment people might have assumed that Nadim made the fix
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