this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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I agree that a small, special purpose OS would probably be more suitable for safety-critical systems. On the other hand I highly doubt that the safety-culture is better at Boeing than in the Linux ecosystem.
Linux and the open source community may be chaotic ...... but companies like Boeing are completely corporate and they will risk or even sacrifice safety if it means making a few extra million or preventing the loss of millions in profits. They'll calculate how much it will cost to make settlements with the families of the dead or in to issuing changes or recalls and figure out which is cheaper .... pay off the dead or fix the problem. If paying off the dead is cheaper, they don't mind watching the body count.
I'd expect it to be about the same, with 737 MAX, yes, on one side and too many examples on the other.
You forget to take into account that every Boeing employee knows they are building systems that can kill people if things go wrong. Meanwhile on Linux a lot of bugs really don't matter that much, especially in -rc and otherwise non LTS versions.
Taking that into account their safety culture is much worse.
For a company building bloody airplanes - yes, I totally agree.