Re: Oracle dodging all VirtualBox development.

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> Wonder how they're doing at Oracle?
>

They're doing badly in my experience. I reported a bug in VirtualBox's
firmware a while back. It's a simple bug, that would never have made it
past QA on real firmware that actually came in ROM on a PC. (No real
machine firmware to my knowledge, and I've played with a few, behaves
like VirtualBox does.) It also has a trivial 1-line fix. I got no end
of argument and tap dancing from a bloke at Oracle about it, quoting
something that wasn't the BIOS32 specification as somehow proof that the
specification isn't clear on what the interface contract is, trying to
pull the "You're the only person to have actually told us about this, so
it isn't a bug." trick, and trying to pull the "It's not Linux, so we
VirtualBox developers won't take you seriously." trick. And all this
after I'd actually provided the 1 line (sic!) fix on a platter in the
initial report.

This, in conjunction with James Moe's experience of another VirtualBox
bug reported in comp.os.os2.misc back in September 2010, gives the
impression that Oracle is basically using whatever flim-flammery it can
to dodge VirtualBox bug reports and do nothing at all.