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.
> 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.