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Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

According to Linus Tech Tips, the disclaimer was unintentional, they intend to honor the warranty, and they're working on removing the disclaimer.

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How does he know the disclaimer was unintentional vs. 'putting it in there to see if we can get away with it?'

It's impossible to really know because we don't have mind reading capabilities, but he believes that their intention was never to void warranties for this.

Nevertheless, by what reasoning does he believe this? Perfect knowledge is impossible, but persuasive argument is not.

I haven’t watched the content OP is mentioning, but Linus has a lot of industry connections so it seems very believable he’d be able to get in touch with someone who knows more about the situation.

The disclaimer is there on the beta firmware pages on archive.org from a year ago, meaning that it was a general policy for beta firmware that had been in place for some time rather than something added specifically for this particular beta.

Why did this clause exist to begin with? Why should installing firmware that Asus itself publicly released void your warranty? I doubt that clause can even be legally enforced.

I can't say for sure but I'd guess it was put in place by the legal team as a form of ass covering, since betas aren't always tested as extensively and there's rarely a good reason for normal users to want to install them.

>working on removing the disclaimer

This is a sentence on a website. If they wanted it would be gone in 5 minutes. You don't need to "work on it".

that sentence on a website is an indicator of internal corporate policy -- it's not the policy itself.

things must change internally before you express to the public that the change has occurred.

Just because one can open notepad.exe and delete a line in five minutes doesn't indicate that that's the speed of business.

You clearly never have worked in a large company. Changing a simple word can take weeks before it even goes to the translation team. Changing a disclaimer involves legal so expect a month of committee meetings before anything new is proposed.

I work for an extremely large organization. All it takes is someone in higher levels to decide this has to be dealt with now. The working on it tells you that leadership doesn't really care.

That's only when a mid-level or lower person/group wants to make a change. If it comes from the C-level, it gets done very quickly.

A friend told me this story: He works for a large company as a software developer. He made a PR to change a compiler setting. It was rejected because the build team believed it would cause them to have to add more machines to the build fleet, and they hadn’t met with the finance team to discuss that, yet. I wouldn’t have thought that changing a compiler setting would require capital expenditures, but here we are.

That sounds both plausible and also considerably dysfunctional from build team perspective

When your friend makes a PR to change compiler settings, it becomes a committee meeting. If the executive director says "GET RID OF THAT LINE ON THE WEBSITE ITS HURTING OUR BUSINESS" it's a 2 hour meeting between leadership, engineering, and legal, and communications and its done.

The speed of the change is proportional to personal authority within the organization of the person requesting the change. When ASUS says "we're working on it" what they mean is "leadership doesn't give a shit".

I assume it's automatically shown for every beta version, so removing it for a single beta release requires some actual technical work.

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