[Sussex] X-Box fire; relevancy thereof...

[Geoffrey Teale]

Evening,

Firstly... happy birthday to me!

Chris Jones wrote:
> Did your PC ship with Linux? Mine didn't, nor did any of the devices I now
> run Linux on ;)

Hmmm one shipped with Red Hat Linux, one shipped with Solaris, one 
shipped with Mac OS X

Mark Harrison wrote:
>>I'm just trying to work out why a hardware design fault on the part of a
>>Chinese company that designed some hardware that ships with a Microsoft
>>logo on the front has ANYTHING to do with Linux.

Well two things really:

0x00 as previously pointed out, people do run Linux on them.  If it were 
a recall of IBM Thinkpads I would be very grateful to hear it from this 
list.

0x01 members of a Linux user group are more likely than a reasonable 
sample, drawn from the population of Sussex, to own an X-Box and 
therefore it is a reasonable audience group for a public spirited warning.

As for the tone of that warning.  Well, it may be a little unfair, but 
not wholly unprecedented for Linux users to take a little pleasure  in 
bad PR for Microsoft.

As for the whole Tivo analogy.  I think it's flawed.  Ultimately the 
board of Microsoft is responsible (it a legal as well as moral sense) 
for all of Microsofts products whether that product is Windows, an X-Box 
or whatever.  It isn't without merit to look at those products as a 
whole and comment on Microsoft's approach to issues of quality, customer 
support and relations, etc., as a whole.

With Linux and F/OSS you can't make those same generalisations.  No one 
person if responsible for anything more that a few small components and 
certainly the state in which they are delivered to a consumer cannot be 
guaranteed by Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman or any member of this list.

If I write bad software it shouldn't reflect badly on you (or visa 
versa.  You have no relationship to me other than the fact that we might 
both write applications on the same platform and use similar licenses. 
If Microsoft release bad software/hardware/underwear it does reflect on 
the quality control mechnisms they have in place and possibly on their 
strategy as a whole and _may_ be cause for concern.

Some people see this spread of accoutability as a weakness in F/OSS 
software - I posit that this is a failure on their part, but that is 
only _my_ opinion.

--
Geoff Teale
Free Software Foundation <tealeg at member.fsf.org>