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For a little additional context, a few days ago, Pan removed himself (using his IBM email address) from the maintainers list in the same file and added himself

For a little additional context, a few days ago, Pan removed himself (using his IBM email address) from the maintainers list in the same file and added himself (using the gmail address) to the reviewers list. The linked commit removes Pan entirely. There’s more going on here than is visible from the out-of-context quote in the commit message.

nodamage 5y ago
Since there are other IBM employees listed in the same file it sounds like the issue is with this specific employee?
dheera 5y ago
Can the community disapprove the pull request and show it to IBM that they don't control the kernel?
- geofft 5y ago
  It would be a little nonsensical for the community to say that IBM does not control the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver," which is located in the drivers/net/ethernet/ibm directory, and which according to this very same MAINTAINERS file is maintained by three other IBM employees.
  - dheera 5y ago
    If they want to control it they can create their own repo and distribute it on their website. If it's going in the Linux kernel tree it should not be subject to single-handed decisions by a corporation.
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      This person can also quit IBM, therefore being subject to no contractual obligation, and then change the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver" entirely free of constraint as long as their code pass review. IBM has no control over the code, only the people it pays to change it.
      - egberts1 5y ago
        not really. there is this stipulation of using a clean room in which to introduce your idea in order not to be sued for “stealing” intellectual property. And often times, the same person cannot be used in that clean room.
      - cocoa19 5y ago
        That's a fair point about clean room implementation. However, I can see IBM shooting themselves in the foot suing a kernel developer over an email address change, if said developer quits beforehand. Such an action would only decrease developer goodwill towards IBM. Needless to say, IBM is already not one of the "cool" companies to work for.
      - vegardno 5y ago
        That's not quite right. If IBM is listed as maintainers for this driver, then any patches would necessarily go through them to end up in the mainline tree. And they could decide to reject patches from the person in question. Although if this happened and legitimate code was rejected by IBM, what could happen is a community backlash against IBM as a maintainer and the code could enter that way.
        londons_explore 5y ago
        People higher up the directory tree can effectively override subdirectory maintainers, all the way up to Linus at the top.
      - usr1106 5y ago
        > This person can also quit IBM, therefore being subject to no contractual obligation, and then change the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver" entirely free I'd assume the person has received confidential information about the IBM technology in question during his employment. Of course the Linux driver is open source so it cannot be a business secret. But typically there is much more knowledge than just the Linux source code. Using business secrets after your employment is most likely enforcable in many legislations. Damages or criminal charges or both.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    That is a fair point to make, and indeed if you look at the commits for other very vendor specific open source network interfaces (like Intel's 10Gbps and 100Gbps NICs), the manufacturer has a very close relationship to publishing drivers for this sort of stuff. Go as far back as the year 2004 and Intel's first generation of PCI-X (not PCI-E!) very expensive 10Gbps NICs for servers, and their FreeBSD drivers. Look at the man pages for them and the @intel.com email addresses who wrote the drivers and the man page. In the case of something like an ethernet card the only persons who might have the appropriate knowledge to write a stable kernel driver probably are the same ones who designed it.
    - dheera 5y ago
      > only persons who might have the appropriate knowledge Sometimes though the community doesn't want just the knowledge of the corporation, we want it plus more. We don't want DVD region restrictions. We don't want GPUs artificially restricted from mining Ethereum. These are the kind of things where an open source person can give a pull request to the repo to include an awesome feature that enables the hardware to do more than it is advertised to do and shove it to their corporate ass. That's the spirit of Linux. If someone was able to make the IBM hardware do something that it was artificially restricted from doing, they should be able to issue a pull request to the repo and get it committed.
      - walrus01 5y ago
        I absolutely agree - in the case of Intel, they've been relatively benevolent and open about publishing the full details of drivers for their NICs, because they have a market demand to sell more NICs. If there were some hidden feature that was not enabled on an Intel 100Gbps NIC, which could be enabled in an open source driver, I'm 100% in favor of doing that. Thankfully there isn't (all praise to our benevolent corporate overlords), but I can certainly see a scenario with another vendor where there might be. I hope that if Intel were to ever go down the route of big ugly closed source binary blob to make a 100Gbps NIC function properly, that people would go buy hardware from another vendor. With some basic consumer grade 1Gbps ethernet stuff you can see this now on a base debian install, where you need to enable the 'non-free' repo and install a .deb for a Broadcom provided driver to make a NIC work. Because their driver is considerably less freely licensed than Intel's. One of the reasons why I try to steer away from any Broadcom network interfaces whenever possible. Or in any other category of hardware. With the current chip shortage and lack of viable competing options, it really sucks that there's literally two high performance GPU vendors that exist on the planet, Nvidia or AMD/ATI, and no other choices.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Nonsensical yes, but it would also be pretty awesome.
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    That being said, the last thing I would do is work with something related to this company without being paid for it.
xupybd 5y ago
If I am reading this correctly he wanted to continue work on this as a hobby. But IBM didn't want him to as he represents IBM.
ganafagol 5y ago
Completely agree. There is a huge iceberg hidden underneath this single commit message and all we are doing here is speculate how it looks like. And it's also pretty certain that posting this message into the eternal commit history can easily be interpreted as trying to make IBM look bad, which tends to not sit well with any employer.

nodamage 5y ago

Since there are other IBM employees listed in the same file it sounds like the issue is with this specific employee?

dheera 5y ago

Can the community disapprove the pull request and show it to IBM that they don't control the kernel?

geofft 5y ago
It would be a little nonsensical for the community to say that IBM does not control the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver," which is located in the drivers/net/ethernet/ibm directory, and which according to this very same MAINTAINERS file is maintained by three other IBM employees.
- dheera 5y ago
  If they want to control it they can create their own repo and distribute it on their website. If it's going in the Linux kernel tree it should not be subject to single-handed decisions by a corporation.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    This person can also quit IBM, therefore being subject to no contractual obligation, and then change the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver" entirely free of constraint as long as their code pass review. IBM has no control over the code, only the people it pays to change it.
    - egberts1 5y ago
      not really. there is this stipulation of using a clean room in which to introduce your idea in order not to be sued for “stealing” intellectual property. And often times, the same person cannot be used in that clean room.
    - cocoa19 5y ago
      That's a fair point about clean room implementation. However, I can see IBM shooting themselves in the foot suing a kernel developer over an email address change, if said developer quits beforehand. Such an action would only decrease developer goodwill towards IBM. Needless to say, IBM is already not one of the "cool" companies to work for.
    - vegardno 5y ago
      That's not quite right. If IBM is listed as maintainers for this driver, then any patches would necessarily go through them to end up in the mainline tree. And they could decide to reject patches from the person in question. Although if this happened and legitimate code was rejected by IBM, what could happen is a community backlash against IBM as a maintainer and the code could enter that way.
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        People higher up the directory tree can effectively override subdirectory maintainers, all the way up to Linus at the top.
    - usr1106 5y ago
      > This person can also quit IBM, therefore being subject to no contractual obligation, and then change the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver" entirely free I'd assume the person has received confidential information about the IBM technology in question during his employment. Of course the Linux driver is open source so it cannot be a business secret. But typically there is much more knowledge than just the Linux source code. Using business secrets after your employment is most likely enforcable in many legislations. Damages or criminal charges or both.
- walrus01 5y ago
  That is a fair point to make, and indeed if you look at the commits for other very vendor specific open source network interfaces (like Intel's 10Gbps and 100Gbps NICs), the manufacturer has a very close relationship to publishing drivers for this sort of stuff. Go as far back as the year 2004 and Intel's first generation of PCI-X (not PCI-E!) very expensive 10Gbps NICs for servers, and their FreeBSD drivers. Look at the man pages for them and the @intel.com email addresses who wrote the drivers and the man page. In the case of something like an ethernet card the only persons who might have the appropriate knowledge to write a stable kernel driver probably are the same ones who designed it.
  - dheera 5y ago
    > only persons who might have the appropriate knowledge Sometimes though the community doesn't want just the knowledge of the corporation, we want it plus more. We don't want DVD region restrictions. We don't want GPUs artificially restricted from mining Ethereum. These are the kind of things where an open source person can give a pull request to the repo to include an awesome feature that enables the hardware to do more than it is advertised to do and shove it to their corporate ass. That's the spirit of Linux. If someone was able to make the IBM hardware do something that it was artificially restricted from doing, they should be able to issue a pull request to the repo and get it committed.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      I absolutely agree - in the case of Intel, they've been relatively benevolent and open about publishing the full details of drivers for their NICs, because they have a market demand to sell more NICs. If there were some hidden feature that was not enabled on an Intel 100Gbps NIC, which could be enabled in an open source driver, I'm 100% in favor of doing that. Thankfully there isn't (all praise to our benevolent corporate overlords), but I can certainly see a scenario with another vendor where there might be. I hope that if Intel were to ever go down the route of big ugly closed source binary blob to make a 100Gbps NIC function properly, that people would go buy hardware from another vendor. With some basic consumer grade 1Gbps ethernet stuff you can see this now on a base debian install, where you need to enable the 'non-free' repo and install a .deb for a Broadcom provided driver to make a NIC work. Because their driver is considerably less freely licensed than Intel's. One of the reasons why I try to steer away from any Broadcom network interfaces whenever possible. Or in any other category of hardware. With the current chip shortage and lack of viable competing options, it really sucks that there's literally two high performance GPU vendors that exist on the planet, Nvidia or AMD/ATI, and no other choices.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Nonsensical yes, but it would also be pretty awesome.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  That being said, the last thing I would do is work with something related to this company without being paid for it.

xupybd 5y ago

If I am reading this correctly he wanted to continue work on this as a hobby. But IBM didn't want him to as he represents IBM.

ganafagol 5y ago

Completely agree. There is a huge iceberg hidden underneath this single commit message and all we are doing here is speculate how it looks like. And it's also pretty certain that posting this message into the eternal commit history can easily be interpreted as trying to make IBM look bad, which tends to not sit well with any employer.