6 ms·

I'm expect if it comes from one of their $X million support contracts their answer will be very different.

bombcar 3y ago
You’d like to think so but often even at that level you’re paying for it not to be your fault. Now if your CTO golfs with an exec at IBM, you might get somewhere.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Ooo, I gotta start playing golf. That might be the way I can get some support for my Gmail account. "If posting to Hacker News doesn't get your support query fixed, book 9 holes with the board members."
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I really need to get off gmail as soon as possible.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  Obvious solution is to get friendly with the package maintainer, find a security vulnerability in the anti-feature you need, lodge security bug, get a CVE, and ask real nicely an upgrade to include the feature^H^H^H^H^H^H^ fix you need. On a serious note, I deal with bug fix / feature requests regularly in Z-Stream (kernel) in an almost weekly cadence, getting the patch upstream, getting the request to backport, making an adequate test of the feature. Source: Worked in product security for little red, now big blue.
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  At Red Hat, this would usually mostly be a PM+dev+QE decision, not C level. If C level got involved, that meant massive customer impairment. There are simply too many open bugs to spend time on something that no customer is apparently interested in, but if a customer came along with a big burning problem and there was no way for them to architect around it, they'd usually fix something like this. When I worked at Red Hat (virtualization-related, but not libvirt) we had a case where a customer would be running a configuration which was... unwise. We still spent a lot of time figuring out how to help them and shipped a patch that made their life easier. The people working there are not evil, they don't intentionally not fix things, but a bug that is seen as a minor limitation and hasn't popped up in any customer case in 5+ years simply won't get fixed. There hundreds if not thousands of other bugs that are more urgent and only so many developers, QE engineers, docs people to work on this. Even if someone wrote a patch for it, it may not get merged due to how expensive Red Hats process for shipping a change is.
josephcsible 3y ago
Having worked for an organization with one of said $X million support contracts with IBM, it often is not.
- adastra22 3y ago
  What is the point of the support contract then?
  - klodolph 3y ago
    There are a lot of various points to support contracts. Support contracts are not “fix any bug” or “implement any feature”, but… - With a support contract, there are SLAs to respond to incidents / bugs within a timely manner, and - You have a clear escalation path to talk to engineers, rather than customer service, and - While you can’t dictate what features / bugs will get fixed, you do have some weight for prioritization. If you have no support contract, then you may not be able to talk to engineers at all, your bug reports may get completely ignored (not even looked at), etc.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Yeah but if the response to your bug report is "WONTFIX", it doesn't much matter if you got that reply in a timely manner. It still does you absolutely no good.
      - janosdebugs 3y ago
        For Red Hat, there are bugs and there are customer cases. The two are not the same, but they are linked internally. Customer cases don't deal with "X functionality doesn't work in libvirt", but rather a higher level issue that the customer can't resolve due to the underlying bug. Here a workaround the customer can live with is a perfectly acceptable solution. In my time I was there I never saw a bug closed as WONTFIX unless the customer case was resolved in a satisfactory manner. Red Hat people are very aware who's paying the bills. I have seen badly managed escalations, but I've never seen anyone taking customer problems lightly. However, bugs that have no customer case attached to them carry very little weight unless an engineer, a PM, etc says that this is really bad and will cause problems in the future. This is part of where the disconnect comes from. Red Hat prides itself in being an open source company, but it is first and foremost a customer-oriented company. Sure, often individual people will take time they have left and go fix something for the community, but if it's something more involved, it will need PM and management support. Benefiting from and also providing their customers with open source is simply part of the model that has worked for Red Hat, but nobody should be under the illusion that this is done for the greater good. Red Hat is a company and companies serve the purpose of making money for their shareholders. If this happens to align with the interests of the open source community, that's awesome, but will not always be the case. Over the past few years there have been numerous instances of that unfortunate reality. Without knowing the specifics about libvirt's funding, if a project needs to be truly community-driven, the community must come up with a model that doesn't involve Red Hat paying a large portion of the salaries of the people involved, or it will be subject to Red Hat's business interests.

You’d like to think so but often even at that level you’re paying for it not to be your fault. Now if your CTO golfs with an exec at IBM, you might get somewhere.

qingcharles 3y ago
Ooo, I gotta start playing golf. That might be the way I can get some support for my Gmail account. "If posting to Hacker News doesn't get your support query fixed, book 9 holes with the board members."
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I really need to get off gmail as soon as possible.
worthless-trash 3y ago
Obvious solution is to get friendly with the package maintainer, find a security vulnerability in the anti-feature you need, lodge security bug, get a CVE, and ask real nicely an upgrade to include the feature^H^H^H^H^H^H^ fix you need. On a serious note, I deal with bug fix / feature requests regularly in Z-Stream (kernel) in an almost weekly cadence, getting the patch upstream, getting the request to backport, making an adequate test of the feature. Source: Worked in product security for little red, now big blue.
janosdebugs 3y ago
At Red Hat, this would usually mostly be a PM+dev+QE decision, not C level. If C level got involved, that meant massive customer impairment. There are simply too many open bugs to spend time on something that no customer is apparently interested in, but if a customer came along with a big burning problem and there was no way for them to architect around it, they'd usually fix something like this. When I worked at Red Hat (virtualization-related, but not libvirt) we had a case where a customer would be running a configuration which was... unwise. We still spent a lot of time figuring out how to help them and shipped a patch that made their life easier. The people working there are not evil, they don't intentionally not fix things, but a bug that is seen as a minor limitation and hasn't popped up in any customer case in 5+ years simply won't get fixed. There hundreds if not thousands of other bugs that are more urgent and only so many developers, QE engineers, docs people to work on this. Even if someone wrote a patch for it, it may not get merged due to how expensive Red Hats process for shipping a change is.

josephcsible 3y ago

Having worked for an organization with one of said $X million support contracts with IBM, it often is not.

adastra22 3y ago
What is the point of the support contract then?
- klodolph 3y ago
  There are a lot of various points to support contracts. Support contracts are not “fix any bug” or “implement any feature”, but… - With a support contract, there are SLAs to respond to incidents / bugs within a timely manner, and - You have a clear escalation path to talk to engineers, rather than customer service, and - While you can’t dictate what features / bugs will get fixed, you do have some weight for prioritization. If you have no support contract, then you may not be able to talk to engineers at all, your bug reports may get completely ignored (not even looked at), etc.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Yeah but if the response to your bug report is "WONTFIX", it doesn't much matter if you got that reply in a timely manner. It still does you absolutely no good.
    - janosdebugs 3y ago
      For Red Hat, there are bugs and there are customer cases. The two are not the same, but they are linked internally. Customer cases don't deal with "X functionality doesn't work in libvirt", but rather a higher level issue that the customer can't resolve due to the underlying bug. Here a workaround the customer can live with is a perfectly acceptable solution. In my time I was there I never saw a bug closed as WONTFIX unless the customer case was resolved in a satisfactory manner. Red Hat people are very aware who's paying the bills. I have seen badly managed escalations, but I've never seen anyone taking customer problems lightly. However, bugs that have no customer case attached to them carry very little weight unless an engineer, a PM, etc says that this is really bad and will cause problems in the future. This is part of where the disconnect comes from. Red Hat prides itself in being an open source company, but it is first and foremost a customer-oriented company. Sure, often individual people will take time they have left and go fix something for the community, but if it's something more involved, it will need PM and management support. Benefiting from and also providing their customers with open source is simply part of the model that has worked for Red Hat, but nobody should be under the illusion that this is done for the greater good. Red Hat is a company and companies serve the purpose of making money for their shareholders. If this happens to align with the interests of the open source community, that's awesome, but will not always be the case. Over the past few years there have been numerous instances of that unfortunate reality. Without knowing the specifics about libvirt's funding, if a project needs to be truly community-driven, the community must come up with a model that doesn't involve Red Hat paying a large portion of the salaries of the people involved, or it will be subject to Red Hat's business interests.