[phire]

> You charge for safety features that cost you nothing to deploy?

If you read the article, that's not what happened.

The warning message was meant to be supplied by default. Boeing though it was supplied by default. The airlines thought they were receiving it.

But they later discovered they had a bug which disabled the warning message unless another feature (an optional luxury feature) was enabled.

This situation is still bad. Boeing should have done something back when they discovered this bug: released a software update, given everyone the optional feature for free, or at the very least notified the pilots.

But it's not "charging for safety features" bad.

[blotter_paper]

I get the distinction you're making, but I still feel like the actions taken by Boeing resulted in charging for a safety feature. I also never bought into Hanlon's razor; I don't accept anything Boeing claims as being true just because they claim it. I don't accept that upper management didn't know, I don't accept that they intended to add this feature in the next software update before they were forced to talk to the FAA about the first crash, and I don't accept that they didn't know about this "bug" until after the plane shipped. Like, really, they didn't test all of the indicators on an airplane before shipping it? Really? If that isn't malice, it's an unbelievable amount of incompetence. I find it more likely that the airlines conspired with Boeing to act like this was a bug rather than admit that the didn't pay for a safety feature, so Boeing gets to act like they intended to ship the software-only safety feature all along. Maybe I'm crazy, the crazy rarely know it.

> This situation is still bad. Boeing should have done something back when they discovered this bug: released a software update, given everyone the optional feature for free, or at the very least notified the pilots.

Do you feel like the failure to do this qualifies as malicious behavior?

Edit: tense.

[phire]

> I still feel like the actions taken by Boeing resulted in charging for a safety feature

I still feel like a distinction needs to be made. According to this article, at no point before the grounding were airlines aware that they needed to pay extra to get this safety feature. Infact, they thought they already had it.

Boeing got no benefit, it was clearly a mistake.

Maybe you could argue the coverup was malicious behaviour, but such coverups can also result from incompetence.

The reason I think a distinction is necessary, is I think incompetence is much more dangerous than maliciousness.

A Malicious company evaluated each corner it cuts. It decides "Can I get away with this particular thing" and it will only cut the corners it thinks it can gets away with, leaving the more dangerous corners un-cut. A Malicious company will have notes on each corner they cut, or at least people who remember, so we can go in later and re-evaluate everything.

On the other-hand, an Incompetent company has no idea where it went wrong. It made random mistakes without realising. The mistakes could be anywhere along the risk-spectrum. They aren't documented. Nobody knows where they are. The only way to be sure you caught all these mistakes it to completely re-examine the whole design.