6 ms·

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

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
  >Try not to turn people into strawmen. As an aside, part of my frustration with talking to you is that specific problem. You're very early to dismiss complaints with things like > (me) 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. >> (you) This perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source. Now I can point to at least a few instances of that happening, but I know from experience that the goalposts will likely move again. I can point to a well respected SDL developer saying "this architecture is not how anything else works and will cause significant issues for the SDL project, and therefor many games on linux" and a gnome developer saying "Fix the applications and libraries that claim the support Wayland, but don't do it properly.". Now even if they were right on a technical level (they weren't) that's no way to talk to your fellow open-source developers who were being very polite and explaining why the proposed architecture wouldn't work. For that particular issue at some point gnome developers did step back and implement CSD. But regardless, "this perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source" is completely out of line and where I decided you weren't worth talking to. I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc, but I'd rather not drag into that. Like I say it gets insulting very quickly. The simple fact is that their reputation for being assholes is, on the whole, earned. I'm sure there are specific cases where it doesn't happen but assholery seems to be endemic to the entire organization. If you want specific documentation on times systemd has caused significant issues (not counting the pwnies that are well documented) I've started documenting my experiences here (unpublished, and something that I'm unlikely to ever publish): https://traverseda.github.io/scratchpad/systemd.md.html https://traverseda.github.io/scratchpad/systemd.md.html Or see this article here: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... Or this rather infamous interaction: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 At some point I suppose I'll get around to documenting the times gnome developers were publicly assholes to other open source contributors, but honestly I'd rather let it go and just ignore the whole project as much as I'm able to.
  - Crysstalis 4y ago
kaba0 4y ago
Frankly, there is no agreement to have here. You are claiming something without any sort of experience/knowledge, which is false, contributing nothing to the topic. This happens all around by similar people under every systemd, gnome and wayland thread. I just don’t understand why are you (plural) pushing a conteo where some evil, open-source hidden government wants to take over the word by.. giving away free software, killing other free software?
robonerd 4y ago
>the graying of gnome They broke their own user -> developer pipeline through years of deliberately alienating power users.

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
>Try not to turn people into strawmen. As an aside, part of my frustration with talking to you is that specific problem. You're very early to dismiss complaints with things like > (me) 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. >> (you) This perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source. Now I can point to at least a few instances of that happening, but I know from experience that the goalposts will likely move again. I can point to a well respected SDL developer saying "this architecture is not how anything else works and will cause significant issues for the SDL project, and therefor many games on linux" and a gnome developer saying "Fix the applications and libraries that claim the support Wayland, but don't do it properly.". Now even if they were right on a technical level (they weren't) that's no way to talk to your fellow open-source developers who were being very polite and explaining why the proposed architecture wouldn't work. For that particular issue at some point gnome developers did step back and implement CSD. But regardless, "this perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source" is completely out of line and where I decided you weren't worth talking to. I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc, but I'd rather not drag into that. Like I say it gets insulting very quickly. The simple fact is that their reputation for being assholes is, on the whole, earned. I'm sure there are specific cases where it doesn't happen but assholery seems to be endemic to the entire organization. If you want specific documentation on times systemd has caused significant issues (not counting the pwnies that are well documented) I've started documenting my experiences here (unpublished, and something that I'm unlikely to ever publish): https://traverseda.github.io/scratchpad/systemd.md.html https://traverseda.github.io/scratchpad/systemd.md.html Or see this article here: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... Or this rather infamous interaction: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 At some point I suppose I'll get around to documenting the times gnome developers were publicly assholes to other open source contributors, but honestly I'd rather let it go and just ignore the whole project as much as I'm able to.
- Crysstalis 4y ago

kaba0 4y ago

Frankly, there is no agreement to have here. You are claiming something without any sort of experience/knowledge, which is false, contributing nothing to the topic. This happens all around by similar people under every systemd, gnome and wayland thread. I just don’t understand why are you (plural) pushing a conteo where some evil, open-source hidden government wants to take over the word by.. giving away free software, killing other free software?

robonerd 4y ago

>the graying of gnome They broke their own user -> developer pipeline through years of deliberately alienating power users.