LinLog

Here's an odd one. A recent Slashdot story last week linked to a summary of Mark Shuttleworth's comments on Dell and Linux. The Slashdot summary said the article contained a response to Shuttleworth that they described as "amusing and telling at the same time."

I found that link odd because I'm not sure if that was meant to be ironic or not. The "amusing and telling" response was, and I quote:

"i'm getting so sick and tired of hearing excuses and rationalizations. just put the cd in the cupholder, install it and sell it. period. there's no need to analyze or certify. what is so hard about this?"

As far as I can tell, the only thing that tells us is that I was right and the community really is full of people who need to grow the hell up.

You almost have to feel sorry for Dell when people say things like that. It's a classic case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't." First, people complain that they don't pre-install Linux because, after all, you just have to stick in the CD and wait. But if they did that, people would complain that the system came unconfigured and they had to just start over from scratch anyway.

It reminds me of an interview with someone from Loki Games that I read years ago. (Wish I could find the link....) For those who don't remember, Loki was in the business of porting popular PC games to Linux. They went out of business in late 2001.

Apparently, they got complaints from some people that they couldn't download their games for free. Sure, the game engines were free and ran on Linux, but the media were all licensed from the original publisher, so Loki couldn't give them away even if they wanted to. But people didn't care about that. They said they wanted games that were open-source and ran natively on Linux, but not enough to pay for them. And yet some still felt entitled to complain about it. I guess it's just human nature....