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.
Sort of unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot of founding a non-profit that fund raises just to undercut the usual shitty consultancy companies that build government websites and apps just to build them properly.
Out of all bugs and feature requests, this one is an outlier in that it requires specific hardware to work on and has an obvious success condition. This means that every man and his dog is not going to be throwing an LLM at this to see if their particular slop wins the prize. People get weird when money is on the line and managing a bounty is a job for which I would never volunteer.
Since you are talking about proprietary software, I assume you mean fixing bugs by the corpo devs themselves.
Well, this would imply broken software. You already payed for the software, now you are required to pay to get bugs fixed? Bad optics, although not beyond contemporary sentiments... Inherently shady incentives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
This kinda only works best for FOSS, incentivizing external devs IMO.
I have a couple old-ish Samsung Galaxy Book x86 tablets that have a similar issue, that I have never quite goaded myself into trying to reverse engineer. I'd love some better material on trying to reverse engineer windows drivers: presumably maybe running windows in qemu with some kind of intercepting pass through?
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. :)
IF $1900 is the bounty, it means it doesn't hurt enough.
I remember going for the highest paying bounty in the Ethereum VM several years ago (I think it was ~$400 DAI/SAI). I did it because I wanted to force myself to learn the internals and to see for myself if the bounty system works. I think I spent a few weeks debugging and ended up splitting the bounty.
As long as the user-facing issues are disconnected from the technical issues, it's going to be hard to get the true value.
Intel HDA was supposed to be a better standard than the AC'97 it was meant to replace. IMHO the blame lies solely on the codec makers for not working with the default settings (they can add additional functionality, but the base audio I/O should work with a generic HDA driver.)
Many of these firmware blobs are non redistributable, if you require this blob, you should grab it and back it up. I know a lot of firwmare can't be legally distributable in linux-firmware.
Lenovo may not be as friendly as IBM to its opensource.
This has been an old problem with Legion laptops. All this will be available free of cost to everyone! Mad respect for people who are pledging their own money and the person who fixed it.
Also, Lenovo Legion Pro 7* are not cheap (not that this would have been justified for cheap laptops).
Shame on Lenovo/<big company> who should have fixed this years ago.
If there's some Lenovo EU rep with enough budget for their department, this person should really be contracted to fix the audio from their laptops one by one. This seemed to take 2 weeks with a dedicated person and remote access but debugging with access to the device could be much faster!
I heard from a frontier coder at deepmind that Gemini, whilst not great at novel frontier coding, is actually pretty good at debugging. Wonder if someone is going to automate a bug bounty pipeline with AI tools.
Wow... one solution is of course to deactivate these. Which is what I did for my Legion 5 Gen 10. Speakers don't seem to be much in use these days anyway.
Still, I didn't expect this amount of custom configuration for my new laptop. Most importantly Bluetooth sound and getting Nvidia driver support. For Bluetooth I ended up writing my own tiny daemon. While driver support exists there seems to be a race condition somewhere between Pipewire, systemd and the bluetooth drivers. And for Nvidia drivers I ended up using the CUDA driver repository which is curiously only available for Debian 12.
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[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadMakes StarBucks barista pay look good…
Of course, if they can churn this out closer to 2 days, maybe there is something there.
Such a talented person would probably prefer a more certain and higher income.
Well, this would imply broken software. You already payed for the software, now you are required to pay to get bugs fixed? Bad optics, although not beyond contemporary sentiments... Inherently shady incentives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
This kinda only works best for FOSS, incentivizing external devs IMO.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490652
I have a couple old-ish Samsung Galaxy Book x86 tablets that have a similar issue, that I have never quite goaded myself into trying to reverse engineer. I'd love some better material on trying to reverse engineer windows drivers: presumably maybe running windows in qemu with some kind of intercepting pass through?
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. :)
I remember going for the highest paying bounty in the Ethereum VM several years ago (I think it was ~$400 DAI/SAI). I did it because I wanted to force myself to learn the internals and to see for myself if the bounty system works. I think I spent a few weeks debugging and ended up splitting the bounty.
As long as the user-facing issues are disconnected from the technical issues, it's going to be hard to get the true value.
- https://gist.github.com/felipelalli/6179aac72735fd35ea3a9854... - https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/issues/1039
It seems like there's a lot of personal information being asked for / thrown around... including a debit/credit card number?
Is there no better way to handle the bounty payment?
Lenovo may not be as friendly as IBM to its opensource.
Also, Lenovo Legion Pro 7* are not cheap (not that this would have been justified for cheap laptops).
Shame on Lenovo/<big company> who should have fixed this years ago.
Still, I didn't expect this amount of custom configuration for my new laptop. Most importantly Bluetooth sound and getting Nvidia driver support. For Bluetooth I ended up writing my own tiny daemon. While driver support exists there seems to be a race condition somewhere between Pipewire, systemd and the bluetooth drivers. And for Nvidia drivers I ended up using the CUDA driver repository which is curiously only available for Debian 12.