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I said it before, will say it again: this should be a problem of Red Hat management. I'm sure they are very much aware Hutterer is overwhelmed (what with blog

I said it before, will say it again: this should be a problem of Red Hat management. I'm sure they are very much aware Hutterer is overwhelmed (what with blog posts, talks even, and all), but they won't hire anyone to work with him. In that blog post, there's a call to share the load but do it as free labor: "Anyway, I'm largely writing this blog post in the hope that someone gets motivated enough to dive into this. Right now, if you get 50 patches into libinput you get the coveted second-from-the-top spot, with all the fame and fortune that entails (i.e. little to none, but hey, underdogs are big in popular culture)." I believe if that position came with a Red Hat paycheck, finding a #2 wouldn't be such a problem.

abrowne 6y ago
Red Hat is part of IBM now. Another post on the homepage right now is "IBM to cut thousands of jobs as coronavirus plays out" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191 Not saying that these IBM jobs are from the Red Hat part of IBM, but not the best time to hope they will hire more.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  The blog post went out back when COVID-19 wasn't a thing.
  - abrowne 6y ago
    It went out not too long after Red Hat became part of IBM. But now that that is the case, IBM's dividends, through whatever turns the world and economy take, may be more important to them than the small subset of their Linux offering that is the desktop. Not that I want this to be true! I writing these comments from a laptop that I special ordered without even a Windows license since I planned to only run Linux on it.
cycloptic 6y ago
You don't need to wait for Red Hat management to decide to do something, it's open source. If your company is a heavy user of libinput and isn't already paying for Red Hat subscriptions, then it's perfectly reasonable for your company to consider paying their own engineer to upstream some changes.
freedomben 6y ago
I work for Red Hat but not on that stuff and I'm not commenting as a RH employee (and have zero insight into how that area of the company works). Red Hat doesn't make much if any money on desktop, yet as you mentioned RH does employ people to work on it. It's already largely a charitable service to the community. As much as I do wish they'd hire more people and make the touchpad amazing, it seems a little entitled to criticize them for not digging even deeper into the charity pockets.
- phkahler 6y ago
  First, I agree with you. Redhat has no obligations here, and if they did increase their "charity" contibutions there are several areas that could use help. That said, it's not charity. They have an interest in keeping the desktop useful for developers who also do some free work for them. I would also argue that making Linux a first-rate desktop operating system would be incredibly beneficial to Redhat/IBM. They also shouldn't be the only ones working toward that, so keeping it minimal might be a good way to get others to contribute - weather paid by someone or not.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    You make some fair points. It's not pure charity since RH does receive indirect benefits from it, but I'd still say it's mostly charity. Maybe you have specifics in mind, but the "free work" I can think of (open source upstreams) is something that equally benefits RH competitors. It's more of a "rising tide lifts all boats" sort of thing. So while RH does receive some benefit from it, it still seems largely charitable to me.
    - phkahler 6y ago
      RH doesnt really have competitors at the moment. None of comparable size anyway, and that's prior to IBM. Microsoft seems to be interested though. Go big or go home?
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  > It's already largely a charitable service to the community. Now that they have a deal with Lenovo to have Fedora preinstalled on their P-series laptops, I do think they have a vested interest in creating a market-worthy workstation OS. I just hope people won't be writing in about it, "Nice try, but palm rejection on the touchpad sucks camel's balls!"

abrowne 6y ago

Red Hat is part of IBM now. Another post on the homepage right now is "IBM to cut thousands of jobs as coronavirus plays out" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191 Not saying that these IBM jobs are from the Red Hat part of IBM, but not the best time to hope they will hire more.

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
The blog post went out back when COVID-19 wasn't a thing.
- abrowne 6y ago
  It went out not too long after Red Hat became part of IBM. But now that that is the case, IBM's dividends, through whatever turns the world and economy take, may be more important to them than the small subset of their Linux offering that is the desktop. Not that I want this to be true! I writing these comments from a laptop that I special ordered without even a Windows license since I planned to only run Linux on it.

cycloptic 6y ago

You don't need to wait for Red Hat management to decide to do something, it's open source. If your company is a heavy user of libinput and isn't already paying for Red Hat subscriptions, then it's perfectly reasonable for your company to consider paying their own engineer to upstream some changes.

freedomben 6y ago

I work for Red Hat but not on that stuff and I'm not commenting as a RH employee (and have zero insight into how that area of the company works). Red Hat doesn't make much if any money on desktop, yet as you mentioned RH does employ people to work on it. It's already largely a charitable service to the community. As much as I do wish they'd hire more people and make the touchpad amazing, it seems a little entitled to criticize them for not digging even deeper into the charity pockets.

phkahler 6y ago
First, I agree with you. Redhat has no obligations here, and if they did increase their "charity" contibutions there are several areas that could use help. That said, it's not charity. They have an interest in keeping the desktop useful for developers who also do some free work for them. I would also argue that making Linux a first-rate desktop operating system would be incredibly beneficial to Redhat/IBM. They also shouldn't be the only ones working toward that, so keeping it minimal might be a good way to get others to contribute - weather paid by someone or not.
- freedomben 6y ago
  You make some fair points. It's not pure charity since RH does receive indirect benefits from it, but I'd still say it's mostly charity. Maybe you have specifics in mind, but the "free work" I can think of (open source upstreams) is something that equally benefits RH competitors. It's more of a "rising tide lifts all boats" sort of thing. So while RH does receive some benefit from it, it still seems largely charitable to me.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    RH doesnt really have competitors at the moment. None of comparable size anyway, and that's prior to IBM. Microsoft seems to be interested though. Go big or go home?
WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
> It's already largely a charitable service to the community. Now that they have a deal with Lenovo to have Fedora preinstalled on their P-series laptops, I do think they have a vested interest in creating a market-worthy workstation OS. I just hope people won't be writing in about it, "Nice try, but palm rejection on the touchpad sucks camel's balls!"