[kwlug disc.] vmware and fedora and corporate responsibility -- what's the deal?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  as a followup to my earlier post on vmware player not installing
properly on a fully-updated fedora 7, i'm interested in others'
opinions on how annoyed i should be about this.  or whether i have the
right to be annoyed at all.

  a decent discussion on this topic is here:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=696176

note the primary point that's being presented there -- that an updated
version of fedora 7 will contain a "bleeding edge" linux kernel that's
not supported by vmware.  but just how convincing a defense is that?

  the last recent major release of the kernel that contained the
vmware-incompatible change is 2.6.22, which had a release date of july
8.  so it's been almost six weeks and, given that fedora has a
reputation of being bleeding edge in the first place, one would think
that six weeks is more than enough time for a company to update their
source to handle that change, *especially* when we're talking about a
distro that's one of the most popular on the planet.  but it's
actually worse than that.

  as i mentioned earlier, that actual change was applied to the main
kernel git tree back on april 10, which means it's been over *four
months* that the kernel tree wouldn't have worked with vmware player.
it may be true that a company has no obligation to be compatible with
the latest git tree, but it would seem that it would be at least a
little irresponsible to not be *tracking* the tree on a regular basis
so that you can flag these things the instant they appear and prepare
to deal with them when the time comes.

  the fact that vmware knew (should have known?) about this issue over
four months ago and did nothing about it, causing grief for numerous
users upon release of a new kernel, strikes me as just plain bad
quality assurance.  but i'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

rday
-- 
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
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