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> 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 everyon

> 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
  >I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc I too can point to multiple specific instances where Linux developers were rude, or where gcc developers were rude, or where SDL developers were rude, or where a lot of other developers were rude. I bet someone could dig through your comment history and find instances where you were rude and unhelpful too, probably even more if you shared any comments from when you were a young teenager. I hope you can see that it is completely ridiculous (and somewhat creepy) for someone to do that to you. Open source programmers just disagree sometimes, and sometimes they have a bad day and aren't totally professional about it, and in larger projects it is a lot more visible than on smaller ones. All you can ask of them is for an apology and then move on. It is unreasonable to expect anything else or to keep harping on this years after the fact. Also it is completely ridiculous that this thread is getting derailed again into complaints about missing features in GNOME. Lennart isn't a GNOME contributor, I don't think he has written any significant code for GNOME at all. The fact that nonsense conflation is being used should be a "snap back to reality" moment. Just don't do it. This always seems to happen and it's always from the same suspects trying to revive the same old >=10 year old forum threads. Please give it a rest and try to do something positive instead, don't let the lwn trolls get inside your head. You are generalizing an entire group of people based on some cherry picked interactions that both of us likely lack the context to fully understand, unless you were "behind the curtain" like the parent comment actually was. If you weren't, then it is just another tone policing comment from the peanut gallery, the kind you probably would find to be bad if they were made from random users on your projects. >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. Letting it go is probably the right choice. If you want to revisit it, I have a suggestion: why don't you go through and publicly document all the times they did something right or the times they were nice to people, and then praise them for that and encourage them to do more of that. Surely you understand that it is not useful to keep beating a horse that died long ago. Just focus on the positive, if the worst thing they did is send some slightly unprofessional email 5-10 years ago (as if most open source developers in the 1990s-2000s didn't do that at some point, I think I lost count of the number of flamewars I read from that period) then it really should not be hard to find some examples of good.

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
>I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc I too can point to multiple specific instances where Linux developers were rude, or where gcc developers were rude, or where SDL developers were rude, or where a lot of other developers were rude. I bet someone could dig through your comment history and find instances where you were rude and unhelpful too, probably even more if you shared any comments from when you were a young teenager. I hope you can see that it is completely ridiculous (and somewhat creepy) for someone to do that to you. Open source programmers just disagree sometimes, and sometimes they have a bad day and aren't totally professional about it, and in larger projects it is a lot more visible than on smaller ones. All you can ask of them is for an apology and then move on. It is unreasonable to expect anything else or to keep harping on this years after the fact. Also it is completely ridiculous that this thread is getting derailed again into complaints about missing features in GNOME. Lennart isn't a GNOME contributor, I don't think he has written any significant code for GNOME at all. The fact that nonsense conflation is being used should be a "snap back to reality" moment. Just don't do it. This always seems to happen and it's always from the same suspects trying to revive the same old >=10 year old forum threads. Please give it a rest and try to do something positive instead, don't let the lwn trolls get inside your head. You are generalizing an entire group of people based on some cherry picked interactions that both of us likely lack the context to fully understand, unless you were "behind the curtain" like the parent comment actually was. If you weren't, then it is just another tone policing comment from the peanut gallery, the kind you probably would find to be bad if they were made from random users on your projects. >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. Letting it go is probably the right choice. If you want to revisit it, I have a suggestion: why don't you go through and publicly document all the times they did something right or the times they were nice to people, and then praise them for that and encourage them to do more of that. Surely you understand that it is not useful to keep beating a horse that died long ago. Just focus on the positive, if the worst thing they did is send some slightly unprofessional email 5-10 years ago (as if most open source developers in the 1990s-2000s didn't do that at some point, I think I lost count of the number of flamewars I read from that period) then it really should not be hard to find some examples of good.