this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
1301 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59586 readers
5454 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We're a government contractor btw
It's actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.