4 ms·

Where do you think they'll go? Canonical? Or will their man-hours be lost to the FOSS community?

• ggreer 7y ago
  Wherever they go, I doubt most of them will continue to work on open source software. I'm not sure if it's a bad thing that these man-hours will be lost to the open source community. I think Red Hat’s involvement in open source has been double edged. Yes, they have funded projects that are crucial to the open source ecosystem, but their main source of revenue is support contracts. That means they have different incentives from most of the users of their software. If a big customer wants some feature, Red Hat tries to add it as fast as they can. If a big customer doesn't want to change their software to use new versions of some dependencies, Red Hat keeps a fork around and applies security patches. These behaviors serve to increase complexity and technical debt while also causing more headaches for maintainers of upstream software. It's very frustrating to have someone say, "I have a bug with your tool." and it turns out they're on an ancient version of libxml that has a bunch of custom patches applied. Also, Red Hat wants to upsell people onto RHEL, which means shoving RHEL into places it doesn’t belong. I ended up quitting because I was tired of pushing back on boneheaded technical decisions made in the service of these incentives. I don't mean to single out Red Hat. It's just the company that showed me how the sausage is made. I think these criticisms can apply to any company that develops open source software with the goal of making money from support.