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> There's an obvious joke there :p > But I think it's reasonably clear that I wasn't saying they were trying to build a moat around desktop linux, but around t

> There's an obvious joke there :p > But I think it's reasonably clear that I wasn't saying they were trying to build a moat around desktop linux, but around those enterprise offerings. One part of that is making their init system the defacto standard. Frankly, no, it was not, or I wouldn't have written that. Those "enterprise offerings" have zero interaction with Pulse outside of some edge cases in SPICE for VDI. The only "moat" that "they" were building (and by "they", you mean "individual contributors who happened to have a @redhat.com email address") was in making desktop Linux usable enough for their engineers to work on it day-to-day. As I said elsewhere, RHEL6 used upstart. "They" made "their" init system the defacto standard by using upstart, finding a metric ton of things wrong with it (and upstart was used in the first place because maintaining complex sysvinit scripts and day 2 operations in horizontally scaling applications was such a nightmare that it was worth throwing away all of the accumulated man hours in those scripts), and writing something better. Nobody forced the Debian steering committee, Arch, Gentoo, Slack, or anybody else to default to systemd. > I don't think I can get into it without being rude, but I think that hasn't born out history. If an outsider does submit patches to scratch their own itch they can expect to at best be held to a much higher standard and at worst be treated quite rudely. I recognize that that's going to be subjective but there's definitely some bad blood between gnome and many third parties. Look at lxqt/lxde, appindicators, etc. GNOME is what it is, and they had that reputation before Pulse. We shouldn't conflate Pulse and systemd just because they were both Lennart any more than you conflate selinux and podman because they're both Dan Walsh. This perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source. If an outsider does submit patches where? Which one of the 600 different projects are they submitting to? How many of them do you presume are controlled by black-robed @redhat maintainers? OpenSSL, Apache/httpd, coreutils, glibc, and a bunch of other core projects have so few maintainers/contributors that we're lucky they move at all. There is not some "Linux@redhat" repo which it all goes to where patches from outsiders get gated. Open source is a reputation-based community. If a @redhat.com email happens to be a maintainer of a widely-used project, it is, broadly, because they earned it through contributions like anybody else. Maintainers, once they get there, do tend to get less rigorous code review. That's true. But nobody hands you maintainer rights along with your badge, and the perception that things work this way is untrue both historically and today.

traverseda 4y ago
I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. That being said there is a bit of hard data, this post nicely shows gnome contributions over time, as less and less non-redhat developer contribute. https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnome/ https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... Now I'm sure you have a dozen explanations lined up for why that might be the case, most of them involving how good redhat is and how they're a bastion of light all that, which sure I have no way to definitively prove that there's any malfeasance going on. Still, I think it's clear that at the very least gnome has a bit of an image problem going on. Where we're not debating any kind of concrete facts as just shouting our subjective opinions of who's the asshole at each other, well I don't expect us to come to any sort of an understanding.
- evol262 4y ago
  > I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. I don't think we'll reach any real agreements either, but I also don't think it's all that subjective. We could say my perspective is skewed from being "behind the curtain" for a decade, but it's equally true that I'm dramatically more informed about the economics and realities of open source contributions due to it. Redhat was (and likely still is) a collection of engineers who are passionate about open source, and get paid to work on it. For a long, long time Redhat paid below the market average. It was not a place you went right out of college. It was a place where people who really gave a damn about open source went because the money was enough, and they got to work on something they felt was actually making software better. It wasn't some corporate machine, it wasn't particularly profit-driven, and it definitely wasn't somewhere where the engineers wanted to push some corporate vision of how Linux should be. As of maybe 2017 or 2018, we started hiring more "new grads" and pivoting more to cloud workloads (outside of what Openstack already had), but the fundamentals didn't really change. The perception of what Redhat is/was and what they actually were/are? is very different. It wasn't a perfect place, and the best ideas didn't always win, but at least you always felt like you could voice them, and you never felt like you were railroading a project to build a "moat" around some business model. Good projects got a lot of developer/admin/ops mindshare, and those dominated the market, so you should write good software which people will like/use. It wasn't complex. One of the things which I miss the most (outside of being surrounded by people who were passionate about software ethics) is QA -- Redhat's QA is, in no small part, what has kept software quality high. > That being said there is a bit of hard data, this post nicely shows gnome contributions over time, as less and less non-redhat developer contribute. > https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... > Now I'm sure you have a dozen explanations lined up for why that might be the case, most of them involving how good redhat is and how they're a bastion of light all that, which sure I have no way to definitively prove that there's any malfeasance going on. Try not to turn people into strawmen. The likely explanation is that GNOME has gotten much more complex and harder to contribute to, and the divide for new contributors to meaningfully fix bugs or add features has gotten wider as GNOME3 has stabilized (and bloated a bit). There's a clear pike just before 3.0, and it kinda declines after that, but some of the other major contributors (Ximian, Collabora, arguably Sun) aren't players anymore. The other missing piece of data here is that, outside of the kernel (which gets a ton of contributions from hardware vendors submitting code to support their own stuff), you'd find the contribution ratio to be shockingly similar. glibc, openssl, and a number of other core projects are also more Redhat than not. That doesn't mean they're trying to control the ecosystem. It means that, yes, it contributes to the company's bottom line, but you shouldn't assume that the contributions have a motive any more sinister than any other contributor. GNOME's image problem is the same as GNOME's image problem always was, but we really haven't been talking about that. I'm not trying to defend Redhat or call you an asshole, but the amount of commits Redhat makes to open source projects all over is not subjective, that they get those commits upstreamed into projects they do not control is not subjective, etc. Don't let your personal opinion about Lennart color what Redhat engineers do for open source or to paint all of them with the same "corporate peon building a 'moat' brush" (which also doesn't describe Lennart). You don't agree with some of the decisions the communities made. That's fine. That's open source, too. It doesn't mean that you're right and Redhat is some Benedict Arnold scheming for control.

traverseda 4y ago

I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. That being said there is a bit of hard data, this post nicely shows gnome contributions over time, as less and less non-redhat developer contribute. https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnome/ https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... Now I'm sure you have a dozen explanations lined up for why that might be the case, most of them involving how good redhat is and how they're a bastion of light all that, which sure I have no way to definitively prove that there's any malfeasance going on. Still, I think it's clear that at the very least gnome has a bit of an image problem going on. Where we're not debating any kind of concrete facts as just shouting our subjective opinions of who's the asshole at each other, well I don't expect us to come to any sort of an understanding.

evol262 4y ago
> I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. I don't think we'll reach any real agreements either, but I also don't think it's all that subjective. We could say my perspective is skewed from being "behind the curtain" for a decade, but it's equally true that I'm dramatically more informed about the economics and realities of open source contributions due to it. Redhat was (and likely still is) a collection of engineers who are passionate about open source, and get paid to work on it. For a long, long time Redhat paid below the market average. It was not a place you went right out of college. It was a place where people who really gave a damn about open source went because the money was enough, and they got to work on something they felt was actually making software better. It wasn't some corporate machine, it wasn't particularly profit-driven, and it definitely wasn't somewhere where the engineers wanted to push some corporate vision of how Linux should be. As of maybe 2017 or 2018, we started hiring more "new grads" and pivoting more to cloud workloads (outside of what Openstack already had), but the fundamentals didn't really change. The perception of what Redhat is/was and what they actually were/are? is very different. It wasn't a perfect place, and the best ideas didn't always win, but at least you always felt like you could voice them, and you never felt like you were railroading a project to build a "moat" around some business model. Good projects got a lot of developer/admin/ops mindshare, and those dominated the market, so you should write good software which people will like/use. It wasn't complex. One of the things which I miss the most (outside of being surrounded by people who were passionate about software ethics) is QA -- Redhat's QA is, in no small part, what has kept software quality high. > That being said there is a bit of hard data, this post nicely shows gnome contributions over time, as less and less non-redhat developer contribute. > https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... > Now I'm sure you have a dozen explanations lined up for why that might be the case, most of them involving how good redhat is and how they're a bastion of light all that, which sure I have no way to definitively prove that there's any malfeasance going on. Try not to turn people into strawmen. The likely explanation is that GNOME has gotten much more complex and harder to contribute to, and the divide for new contributors to meaningfully fix bugs or add features has gotten wider as GNOME3 has stabilized (and bloated a bit). There's a clear pike just before 3.0, and it kinda declines after that, but some of the other major contributors (Ximian, Collabora, arguably Sun) aren't players anymore. The other missing piece of data here is that, outside of the kernel (which gets a ton of contributions from hardware vendors submitting code to support their own stuff), you'd find the contribution ratio to be shockingly similar. glibc, openssl, and a number of other core projects are also more Redhat than not. That doesn't mean they're trying to control the ecosystem. It means that, yes, it contributes to the company's bottom line, but you shouldn't assume that the contributions have a motive any more sinister than any other contributor. GNOME's image problem is the same as GNOME's image problem always was, but we really haven't been talking about that. I'm not trying to defend Redhat or call you an asshole, but the amount of commits Redhat makes to open source projects all over is not subjective, that they get those commits upstreamed into projects they do not control is not subjective, etc. Don't let your personal opinion about Lennart color what Redhat engineers do for open source or to paint all of them with the same "corporate peon building a 'moat' brush" (which also doesn't describe Lennart). You don't agree with some of the decisions the communities made. That's fine. That's open source, too. It doesn't mean that you're right and Redhat is some Benedict Arnold scheming for control.