1. Doesn't the GPL have a stipulation, that if the text of the licenses is amended or modified, that you need to refer back to the original license? 2. I see why they're getting picky about it, but do these guys really have anything to offer? Okay, you get the source code for a service. What's useful there? Are these guys actually doing anything to change or improve the product? Something more than a graphics treatment? Do we know that? I'm skeptical.
This is a terrible argument, and a poorly written article over on Bloomberg. The writer got themselves so flustered that they couldn't be bothered to proof-read, or make a coherent point that doesn't stretch credulity. I would call this, "panic journalism."
You can't do statistics this way because methods of generating power are shifting. Coal plants are dying off across the world. Part of the problem with this article, not to defend coal, is that there is no one way to measure coal emissions. It depends largely on when the power plants were constructed, what the local regulations are, and the size of the plant. You can't just run an average on it, and hope to be close to the truth of the matter. Even comparing Poland to Belarus is silly. And it gets sillier when you start talking about Germany and France.
But even that is mundane when you put it in the terms stated. Europe, as we all know is working hard to solve the power problem. They're doing it in ways that are a lot more radical than anything we've seen in the US. To start talking about carbon footprints, as they stand today, before the industry has even taken hold is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
Of course, when it comes to panic journalism, that's kinda the point, so I can't fault them for that.
I think we're seeing a powder keg of technology coming to maturity at the same time. We're seeing genetic augmentation, radical life expansion, cloning, and AI all swirling around us, ready to be available to make our lives better, and longer, and more productive. We're also seeing some new techniques in robotics and innovations in farming that asuage a lot of the concerns about overpopulation in a very practical way.
What's concerning about all of it, is that there does seem to be a group of people out there, on both sides of the party line that are scared of all of this.
Historically, all you need for fascism is a false but popular belief, a charismatic speaker, and fear of change.
The only ingredient that's missing here is the charismatic speaker.
Seems like the only thing something like this would do is deter voters. Hackers know better. This is a perfect case and point as to why people who don't understand computers, networks, or the internet shouldn't be making rules that govern it.
They talk about the market imploding and correcting itself as though that's a bad thing. This happens with Bitcoin every couple of years. The system and the market always comes out stronger at the end of the cycle. This isn't news.
Let's face it, there's no possible way we're going to reduce meat consumption. But the way we make and harvest meat is already changing. Techniques for generating lab grown meat are almost ready for prime time, as well as new robotic farms which are starting to come online in California and Europe. I think the best outcome here is lab meat grown by robots on robot farms that live inside dank maze like underground fortresses of goodness.
There's this one big recruiting company that's very interested in me again for some reason. Been corresponding with one of their recruiters at length for a couple of weeks now. Last night, I was talking about the things I will and won't work on, and/or code with. I mentioned that I'll write code on or for just about anything... except.net. To which I followed up, "But Microsoft has been oddly standards based the last couple of years, it's completely out of character for them. And, honestly, I'm worried them. I hope they feel better and get back to their evil uncompetitive selves soon."
All you're really doing at that point is pushing conformity, because your idea of what's "better" is going to diverge a lot. I think it'll be gamed, I think it'll be abused, and I think there will be companies that are absolutely obsessed with the technology. Sort of like the way people fixate on personality tests or blood nicotine levels now. It's one more thing for corporate america to waste their money on. The good news, is that you'll be able to spot the crazy ones. And just ignore any company that insists on using it as part of their hiring process.
Exactly. You've done the whole thing respectfully, shown initiative at that point.
It's really the kind of thing you have to pay attention to politics on, though. Could be that your boss is a luddite, and won't understand what's just happened. That could be bad for everyone. If your boss is a luddite, and you were never hired as a programmer to begin with, double the potential trouble.
I like the idea of documenting the whole thing though.
When I was a lot younger, I did something like that, I told my boss about it. He followed my progress closely. When I was done, the tool worked beautifully. We pressed a button, and the project was done in about half an hour.
The program did something that it would have taken our eight man team six months to do.
He decided to let us sit around for three months, smoking cigarettes in the atriums. Then he called the project done, and let us all go.
Nobody was especially upset about it, because, well, you know, contracting is like that. You never really know how long any assignment is going to be. You're basically a temp, but paid a whole lot better.
Good news, is that the job market at the time was incredible, and none of us had trouble finding other projects. But the truth is, I did it to be cute.
I wrote a piece of code that put nine people out of work, without really even thinking about it. In hindsight, it would have been better for me to just deal with the drudgery of it.
Did get one hell of a reference from it though.
I guess the lesson there, in terms of communication, is look before you automate. Not after.
I would argue that it's no necessarily about time, but rather, availability. They want to be able to reach you, talk to you, and ask you questions about the work that's been done. If you've automated that work, and you still make yourself available, then you're not morally in the wrong. But that does mean you probably don't want to be freelancing with all this new free time you've made for yourself. It's in incredibly bad taste to do something like that. I would do something less conspicuous, like learn a new programming language, or listen to an audiobook. As long as you're available during the business hours they want you to be there... then you've got moral clarity.
We live in an age where programmers are pretty used to transpiling. We have entire languages like Elixir and Scala that transpile to Erlang and Java respectively, and dozens of others. This has been going on for 20 years. We do it all the time. React, Typescript, and Angular couldn't exist without it.
The way I see it, transpiling is the answer here. Doesn't even matter which way you do it.
Say for example, you wanted to hire young cheap programmers to write code against legacy systems. Just come up with a transpiler that converts whatever it is they're working in into COBOL/DB2 that'll compile against those ancient IBM steel giants. It'll take work to get there, but you're writing non trivial in house code with it's own frameworks and coding standards anyway. If you're still using COBOL, complex projects are pretty commonplace.
Or, if you're feeling enterprising, you could write something that will work against the existing code in your environment, and transpile yourself out of cobol completely, and into something a little more modern like Java, Go, or C. They've had the time, they certainly have the resources to do something like this. And if they did, they would be able to cut costs in the longer term, be more platform flexible than they are, and deliver a higher quality of product to their internal stakeholders, other employees, and customers.
If they really cared about solving this problem, they would just do it. It wouldn't even be a conversation. It would happen, it would be done. No, this isn't really about COBOL or a shortage of old programmers who know COBOL. This is a pretense to bring in exploited offshore labor from the third world, in order to drive down rates in the labor market when the cost of living is at an all time high. "There's no solution, so we have no choice but to train offshore resources and bring them stateside to do it" is pure fucking transparent bullshit. And we should know better than to fall for it.
Yeah, but every sufficiently large organization, corporation, and government has things about it that are untenable. For example, I'm working on a scala microservices stack right now, and it's relatively new. But the developers that deployed the original iteration didn't really know the language or the platforms they're working on, so the project six months in is as bad or worse than the worst vb and java apps I've ever seen.
Fucking verbose case classes EVERYWHERE, and entire sections of architecture that simply don't need to exist. And yet, pretty much everybody's okay with it. It works, right? At least against the mocks?
I guess my point is that there's no avoiding it. There's no such thing as quality in code in a production environment, and as a professional developer, you just get used to that unfortunate reality.
Granted, some environments are better than others, and I'm sure that's true about the banking sector as well.
I remember when the claim of a post-pc era hit slashdot. I laughed. I was more than a little skeptical. Then I was a little scared. In the weeks and months that followed, I argued passionately that there will be no end of the pc era. That these devices are toys, useless, no good to anyone. And they were. The early dozen generations of mobile devices really sucked for anything but playing thumbzilla and watching netflix. It all seemed like a waste.
My job never changed. Not really. Now the corporation makes me use a mac instead of a thinkpad. The tools I use to write code continue to get better in leaps and bounds, and it's a lot less painful to do the kind of work I do than it used to be.
But you know something?
My brother owns two android phones and a tablet. He barely knows how to read, hates computers, and lives on disability. In fact, most low income people I know now check their email. I hired a mechanic on craigslist, one of these little guys from the sticks, and even he's got an iphone.
Mobile devices are everywhere. Just as a matter of course, these days, we build for responsive, rather than adaptive control sets with a mobile first approach, because the sites we work with have more mobile traffic than pc traffic. Especially on the local level, for services that you might try to find as you're driving. We only use the full resolution version of any given site as a sales tool, to show clients how cool their business looks. But we know full well that they'll get most of their leads from people on mobile.
I still don't see mobile becoming more useful than PC's. It's made some headway, but it's just not here yet. Then again, I don't know if it matters now since the advent of home ai's that tie all of your devices together, and can do things like stream to your tv, and tell terrible pun laden jokes.
Anyway, I think we are living in a post pc age, if by post pc, you mean an age in which the PC is no longer the sole media/internet center of everyone's life. Just don't know if Jobs really deserves credit for predicting that.
An open git directory will be everything you need to reconstruct the site, more often than not from the same server you're targeting. Scary. Database servers are rarely open. Short of some serious hacking, there isn't a lot you're going to be able to do with this stuff once you've obtained the information you're waving around here.
Until such time as I see hackers actually logging in with this information and defacing github, I'm going to remain unconvinced of the severity of this one.
Well, yeah. The 30% number insures that you would have to have a finite and probably much smaller catalog in europe than the US. Politicians in the EU are certifiably stupid. Of course, there's not much better in the US.
It's been coming to that, slowly but surely. The minute it costs more to do business in a country than the value that country brings to the table, these american services will pull out and leave the backwaters of the world.
Question is, if european sourced content is so great, why bother with mandating netflix consume it? If the demand exists, why not create or fund a european service that sources primarily european entertainment?
I don't think you need an AI to screen names, especially on emails. Obscenity filters aren't going to pick up anything on the name of the sender that they won't find in the body of an email. If the body of the email isn't flashing red with signs of abuse, then chances are... that your sender's name is fine, even if it's a last name like Weiner (which would be an absolutely idiotic thing for an obscenity filter to pick up on in the first place).
Filters like this are designed to be gamed. If your users have an IQ over 80, they're going to do it. Back in the day, when Planet Source Code was a thing, they had an incredibly aggressive filter there. Screened out all profanity, and went to far as to prevent you from using words like stupid and idiot. But you know, when you would see comments like "You're a S***** I*****!!!!" your mind would just go to places a lot worse than the terms the filter was trying to prevent you from seeing. At that particular site, it became sort of a running joke to call people Ldiots. I don't remember, offhand, how long it went on, or if they're still doing it, but it was fun.
Machine learning algorithms could be useful here. I don't know how sophisticated they need to be. The problem, at least as far as I see it has never been the technology, so much as the people who run it. They're the problem. They've always been the problem. And as long as we live in an internet culture where people want to impose language standards on others, it's not something that's going to go away anytime soon. Regardless as to how cool some of these machine learning programs are.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, stop being assholes. Don't filter people who you're expecting to be able to converse like adults. If you're working with children, this might be a learning moment... for both of you. But you're not helping anyone by being a fucking cunt -- and you're probably doing more harm than good.
Well, to do the kind of support he's talking about would be very unusual indeed. You're going to see support come down with one mainline distro, and one window manager. And that's it. Even in OSS projects.
The op is like every poor excuse I've ever heard on a Linux message board. Let's go through point by point and talk about some of this.
For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels. If you're an open source developer, focusing on a single distribution, that's not a problem.
No, that's simply untrue. Nobody in the commercial world supports all of Linux in this way. In fact, I don't know of many oss vendors that do either. If you're going to support Linux, what you're usually talking about in the real world is some major implementation of Ubuntu, and/or Cent/Redhat. That's it. Yeah, you really do need to think of it as two operating systems, because of differences in the package manager, but it's not terrible. It can be managed.
If you're a company that produces a product (and you stake your living on that product), those multiple points of entry do become a problem. Let's consider Adobe (and Photoshop). If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that?
Actually, they did it with Wine. Wasn't released but they did talk about having done it.
Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs, Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mate, KDE, systemd? You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?
My hope is that if Any Given Company were hiring people, and talking seriously about a project like this, that they would have actual Linux people who have experience in developing commercial projects for Linux. Even an entry level Linux developer straight out of highschool programming class could tell you the whole argument is bullshit.
That said, no, I could care less what Dropbox does.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I have a feeling that contributors would be holding their breath for a long time over that one?
1. Doesn't the GPL have a stipulation, that if the text of the licenses is amended or modified, that you need to refer back to the original license?
2. I see why they're getting picky about it, but do these guys really have anything to offer? Okay, you get the source code for a service. What's useful there? Are these guys actually doing anything to change or improve the product? Something more than a graphics treatment? Do we know that? I'm skeptical.
This is a terrible argument, and a poorly written article over on Bloomberg. The writer got themselves so flustered that they couldn't be bothered to proof-read, or make a coherent point that doesn't stretch credulity. I would call this, "panic journalism."
You can't do statistics this way because methods of generating power are shifting. Coal plants are dying off across the world. Part of the problem with this article, not to defend coal, is that there is no one way to measure coal emissions. It depends largely on when the power plants were constructed, what the local regulations are, and the size of the plant. You can't just run an average on it, and hope to be close to the truth of the matter. Even comparing Poland to Belarus is silly. And it gets sillier when you start talking about Germany and France.
But even that is mundane when you put it in the terms stated. Europe, as we all know is working hard to solve the power problem. They're doing it in ways that are a lot more radical than anything we've seen in the US. To start talking about carbon footprints, as they stand today, before the industry has even taken hold is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
Of course, when it comes to panic journalism, that's kinda the point, so I can't fault them for that.
I guess I won't be buying one of these. Oh well.
I think we're seeing a powder keg of technology coming to maturity at the same time. We're seeing genetic augmentation, radical life expansion, cloning, and AI all swirling around us, ready to be available to make our lives better, and longer, and more productive. We're also seeing some new techniques in robotics and innovations in farming that asuage a lot of the concerns about overpopulation in a very practical way.
What's concerning about all of it, is that there does seem to be a group of people out there, on both sides of the party line that are scared of all of this.
Historically, all you need for fascism is a false but popular belief, a charismatic speaker, and fear of change.
The only ingredient that's missing here is the charismatic speaker.
Really does make my day richer, knowing that I can run around the city yelling "I have moonmoons!" and have it actually mean something.
Seems like the only thing something like this would do is deter voters. Hackers know better. This is a perfect case and point as to why people who don't understand computers, networks, or the internet shouldn't be making rules that govern it.
I dare say, that's the nicest thing I've ever heard about a piece of malware doing in the wild.
There are several ways to do it. But with the volatility of bitcoin at any given moment, I wouldn't advise using any of them.
They talk about the market imploding and correcting itself as though that's a bad thing. This happens with Bitcoin every couple of years. The system and the market always comes out stronger at the end of the cycle. This isn't news.
Let's face it, there's no possible way we're going to reduce meat consumption. But the way we make and harvest meat is already changing. Techniques for generating lab grown meat are almost ready for prime time, as well as new robotic farms which are starting to come online in California and Europe. I think the best outcome here is lab meat grown by robots on robot farms that live inside dank maze like underground fortresses of goodness.
There's this one big recruiting company that's very interested in me again for some reason. Been corresponding with one of their recruiters at length for a couple of weeks now. Last night, I was talking about the things I will and won't work on, and/or code with. I mentioned that I'll write code on or for just about anything... except .net. To which I followed up, "But Microsoft has been oddly standards based the last couple of years, it's completely out of character for them. And, honestly, I'm worried them. I hope they feel better and get back to their evil uncompetitive selves soon."
All you're really doing at that point is pushing conformity, because your idea of what's "better" is going to diverge a lot. I think it'll be gamed, I think it'll be abused, and I think there will be companies that are absolutely obsessed with the technology. Sort of like the way people fixate on personality tests or blood nicotine levels now. It's one more thing for corporate america to waste their money on. The good news, is that you'll be able to spot the crazy ones. And just ignore any company that insists on using it as part of their hiring process.
Exactly. You've done the whole thing respectfully, shown initiative at that point.
It's really the kind of thing you have to pay attention to politics on, though.
Could be that your boss is a luddite, and won't understand what's just happened. That could be bad for everyone.
If your boss is a luddite, and you were never hired as a programmer to begin with, double the potential trouble.
I like the idea of documenting the whole thing though.
When I was a lot younger, I did something like that, I told my boss about it. He followed my progress closely.
When I was done, the tool worked beautifully. We pressed a button, and the project was done in about half an hour.
The program did something that it would have taken our eight man team six months to do.
He decided to let us sit around for three months, smoking cigarettes in the atriums. Then he called the project done, and let us all go.
Nobody was especially upset about it, because, well, you know, contracting is like that. You never really know how long any assignment is going to be. You're basically a temp, but paid a whole lot better.
Good news, is that the job market at the time was incredible, and none of us had trouble finding other projects.
But the truth is, I did it to be cute.
I wrote a piece of code that put nine people out of work, without really even thinking about it.
In hindsight, it would have been better for me to just deal with the drudgery of it.
Did get one hell of a reference from it though.
I guess the lesson there, in terms of communication, is look before you automate.
Not after.
I would argue that it's no necessarily about time, but rather, availability. They want to be able to reach you, talk to you, and ask you questions about the work that's been done. If you've automated that work, and you still make yourself available, then you're not morally in the wrong. But that does mean you probably don't want to be freelancing with all this new free time you've made for yourself. It's in incredibly bad taste to do something like that. I would do something less conspicuous, like learn a new programming language, or listen to an audiobook. As long as you're available during the business hours they want you to be there... then you've got moral clarity.
We live in an age where programmers are pretty used to transpiling. We have entire languages like Elixir and Scala that transpile to Erlang and Java respectively, and dozens of others. This has been going on for 20 years. We do it all the time. React, Typescript, and Angular couldn't exist without it.
The way I see it, transpiling is the answer here. Doesn't even matter which way you do it.
Say for example, you wanted to hire young cheap programmers to write code against legacy systems. Just come up with a transpiler that converts whatever it is they're working in into COBOL/DB2 that'll compile against those ancient IBM steel giants. It'll take work to get there, but you're writing non trivial in house code with it's own frameworks and coding standards anyway. If you're still using COBOL, complex projects are pretty commonplace.
Or, if you're feeling enterprising, you could write something that will work against the existing code in your environment, and transpile yourself out of cobol completely, and into something a little more modern like Java, Go, or C. They've had the time, they certainly have the resources to do something like this. And if they did, they would be able to cut costs in the longer term, be more platform flexible than they are, and deliver a higher quality of product to their internal stakeholders, other employees, and customers.
If they really cared about solving this problem, they would just do it. It wouldn't even be a conversation. It would happen, it would be done. No, this isn't really about COBOL or a shortage of old programmers who know COBOL. This is a pretense to bring in exploited offshore labor from the third world, in order to drive down rates in the labor market when the cost of living is at an all time high. "There's no solution, so we have no choice but to train offshore resources and bring them stateside to do it" is pure fucking transparent bullshit. And we should know better than to fall for it.
Yeah, but every sufficiently large organization, corporation, and government has things about it that are untenable. For example, I'm working on a scala microservices stack right now, and it's relatively new. But the developers that deployed the original iteration didn't really know the language or the platforms they're working on, so the project six months in is as bad or worse than the worst vb and java apps I've ever seen.
Fucking verbose case classes EVERYWHERE, and entire sections of architecture that simply don't need to exist. And yet, pretty much everybody's okay with it. It works, right? At least against the mocks?
I guess my point is that there's no avoiding it. There's no such thing as quality in code in a production environment, and as a professional developer, you just get used to that unfortunate reality.
Granted, some environments are better than others, and I'm sure that's true about the banking sector as well.
I remember when the claim of a post-pc era hit slashdot. I laughed. I was more than a little skeptical. Then I was a little scared. In the weeks and months that followed, I argued passionately that there will be no end of the pc era. That these devices are toys, useless, no good to anyone. And they were. The early dozen generations of mobile devices really sucked for anything but playing thumbzilla and watching netflix. It all seemed like a waste.
My job never changed. Not really. Now the corporation makes me use a mac instead of a thinkpad. The tools I use to write code continue to get better in leaps and bounds, and it's a lot less painful to do the kind of work I do than it used to be.
But you know something?
My brother owns two android phones and a tablet. He barely knows how to read, hates computers, and lives on disability. In fact, most low income people I know now check their email. I hired a mechanic on craigslist, one of these little guys from the sticks, and even he's got an iphone.
Mobile devices are everywhere. Just as a matter of course, these days, we build for responsive, rather than adaptive control sets with a mobile first approach, because the sites we work with have more mobile traffic than pc traffic. Especially on the local level, for services that you might try to find as you're driving. We only use the full resolution version of any given site as a sales tool, to show clients how cool their business looks. But we know full well that they'll get most of their leads from people on mobile.
I still don't see mobile becoming more useful than PC's. It's made some headway, but it's just not here yet. Then again, I don't know if it matters now since the advent of home ai's that tie all of your devices together, and can do things like stream to your tv, and tell terrible pun laden jokes.
Anyway, I think we are living in a post pc age, if by post pc, you mean an age in which the PC is no longer the sole media/internet center of everyone's life. Just don't know if Jobs really deserves credit for predicting that.
An open git directory will be everything you need to reconstruct the site, more often than not from the same server you're targeting. Scary. Database servers are rarely open. Short of some serious hacking, there isn't a lot you're going to be able to do with this stuff once you've obtained the information you're waving around here.
Until such time as I see hackers actually logging in with this information and defacing github, I'm going to remain unconvinced of the severity of this one.
Well, yeah. The 30% number insures that you would have to have a finite and probably much smaller catalog in europe than the US. Politicians in the EU are certifiably stupid. Of course, there's not much better in the US.
It's been coming to that, slowly but surely. The minute it costs more to do business in a country than the value that country brings to the table, these american services will pull out and leave the backwaters of the world.
Question is, if european sourced content is so great, why bother with mandating netflix consume it? If the demand exists, why not create or fund a european service that sources primarily european entertainment?
I don't think you need an AI to screen names, especially on emails. Obscenity filters aren't going to pick up anything on the name of the sender that they won't find in the body of an email. If the body of the email isn't flashing red with signs of abuse, then chances are... that your sender's name is fine, even if it's a last name like Weiner (which would be an absolutely idiotic thing for an obscenity filter to pick up on in the first place).
Filters like this are designed to be gamed. If your users have an IQ over 80, they're going to do it. Back in the day, when Planet Source Code was a thing, they had an incredibly aggressive filter there. Screened out all profanity, and went to far as to prevent you from using words like stupid and idiot. But you know, when you would see comments like "You're a S***** I*****!!!!" your mind would just go to places a lot worse than the terms the filter was trying to prevent you from seeing. At that particular site, it became sort of a running joke to call people Ldiots. I don't remember, offhand, how long it went on, or if they're still doing it, but it was fun.
Machine learning algorithms could be useful here. I don't know how sophisticated they need to be. The problem, at least as far as I see it has never been the technology, so much as the people who run it. They're the problem. They've always been the problem. And as long as we live in an internet culture where people want to impose language standards on others, it's not something that's going to go away anytime soon. Regardless as to how cool some of these machine learning programs are.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, stop being assholes. Don't filter people who you're expecting to be able to converse like adults. If you're working with children, this might be a learning moment... for both of you. But you're not helping anyone by being a fucking cunt -- and you're probably doing more harm than good.
That's really all I have to say about it.
Well, to do the kind of support he's talking about would be very unusual indeed.
You're going to see support come down with one mainline distro, and one window manager. And that's it.
Even in OSS projects.
Nobody ever could or would support everything.
The op is like every poor excuse I've ever heard on a Linux message board. Let's go through point by point and talk about some of this.
For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels. If you're an open source developer, focusing on a single distribution, that's not a problem.
No, that's simply untrue. Nobody in the commercial world supports all of Linux in this way. In fact, I don't know of many oss vendors that do either. If you're going to support Linux, what you're usually talking about in the real world is some major implementation of Ubuntu, and/or Cent/Redhat. That's it. Yeah, you really do need to think of it as two operating systems, because of differences in the package manager, but it's not terrible. It can be managed.
If you're a company that produces a product (and you stake your living on that product), those multiple points of entry do become a problem. Let's consider Adobe (and Photoshop). If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that?
Actually, they did it with Wine. Wasn't released but they did talk about having done it.
Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs, Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mate, KDE, systemd? You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?
My hope is that if Any Given Company were hiring people, and talking seriously about a project like this, that they would have actual Linux people who have experience in developing commercial projects for Linux. Even an entry level Linux developer straight out of highschool programming class could tell you the whole argument is bullshit.
That said, no, I could care less what Dropbox does.