EPEL (was Re: RFC: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next" (draft of my Flock talk))

Tue Jul 23 21:11:45 UTC 2013

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On 07/23/2013 04:07 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> On 07/23/2013 07:11 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:
>> so you have no plan how large the positive impact is but you 
>> attack Redhat and employees in a subtle way wherever you can?
>> 
> 
> For the first you do realize that Red Hat is a corporate and my
> view of corporate involvement is the same in open source community
> is the same regardless of what that company is called and as a
> company they exist to make money. Red Hat just approaches open
> source community with ROI.
> 
> Now if I was cabable of being subtle yes then you might claim that
> I did that but since I'm not that argument of yours does not hold
> water and somehow you make the assumption that all Red Hat
> employees have positive impact on the project or in upstream in
> general even those employees that literally walk about and claim
> that Red Hat owns various upstreams I guess you have never met
> those individuals?
> 
> Look at the Gnome desktop team history here [1] within the project
> or for example just recent case [2] where one spends several hours
> fixing outdated and broken spec file submits in good faith trying
> to help only have that work dismissed because the Red Hat
> maintainer does not "feel" like it and wants to replace it with
> something that violates the projects guidelines instead [3][4].
> 
> Do you know who approach me and thank me for looking into and help 
> fixing this. Obviously it was not Steve, Do you think it was Jeff
> Layton which I do believe is the other NFS maintainer nope not him
> either it was Harald Hoyer, he noticed I was helping out and he
> approach me and thanked me for it.
> 
> And if you think about it, how many thanks do you see in general in
> bug reports or in changelog an simple thanks or thank you from Red
> Hat employees to community contributions?
> 

For the record, I'd like you to have a look at basically any
community-reported bug in the 'sssd' component of BZ or
community-submitted patches on the sssd-devel list. That's a project
comprised nearly entirely of Red Hat employees.[1]

You may notice that our *first* reaction to anyone contributing a
patch or a bug is to say "Thank you!". I find your assertion that all
Red Hatters are aloof or ungracious to be quite insulting. In all
communities, there are people with different personalities. I'd argue
that in general, the level of polite discourse seen on the Fedora
devel@ list is *significantly* higher than that on the Linux kernel
mailing list.

On the other hand, we do still have our share of individuals whose
primary contribution appears to be belittling the efforts of other
contributors to no obvious purpose. You are not alone in this, but you
are a contributor to this problem.

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but not everyone will always
agree with you. There will be times in this community that people will
have different opinions. It's most certainly not limited to Red Hatters.

Also, I find the insinuation that the pursuit of income on Red Hat's
part in some way taints the value of Fedora. It seems to me that
you've decided to assume that Red Hat's purpose is to abuse the poor,
hard-working Fedorans by stealing their work, running off to make
money off of it and giving nothing back.

Putting aside the fact that Red Hat contributes almost the entirety of
the base OS stack to Fedora right now (nearly everything from the
kernel to the basic runtime) is maintained almost exclusively by Red
Hat, the company also provides essentially all of the funding
necessary to keep the lights on. Red Hat provides the datacenters that
house Koji, Bodhi, Fedorahosted, mailman and many of the other servers
used by Fedora Infrastructure. I don't have the numbers available to
me personally (as I am an engineer and work for a living) but even a
quick glance at server costs for colo services would imply that we're
talking about tens of thousands of dollars a year *at minimum* just to
keep the infrastructure up and running. That's not even touching on
the salaries of the people Red Hat pays just to work on Fedora. Not
projects in Fedora, but paid to enhance the infrastructure, add new
functionality to the build systems and organize events like Flock.

I would very much like to know how you would expect Fedora to function
in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one or
more organizations like Red Hat. No, Red Hat does not fund Fedora
purely out of the goodness of its heart. It does so because Fedora
provides value to Red Hat in that it is a think-tank and innovation
generator for open-source in general. Not everything that goes into
Fedora appears in Red Hat's product portfolio, and certainly Red Hat
would never attempt to *stop* such projects from participating in
Fedora. Part of the *value* of Fedora is that sometimes great ideas
pop up out of nowhere.

Like I said above, not everyone agrees all the time, and certainly not
even inside Red Hat. Every once in a while, someone like you shows up
with the assertion that everyone at Red Hat is conspiring together to
force Fedora in a particular direction. If you could see our internal
mailing lists, you would realize how laughable that is. For every bit
that Red Hat recognizes the value in the randomness and surprising
innovation of community contributors, we recognize it in our employees
too. In fact, a very large percentage of Red Hat employees were hired
from that very community because they were showing that they had
skills and knowledge to solve problems and Red Hat wanted to be able
to have them doing so as a full-time job. They weren't hired to "force
them into line", they were hired because someone paid to spend 40-60
hours a week on something they love produces much better results than
someone who spends a few hours a night on a hobby. When Red Hat hires
engineers, they are hiring "warts and all".

I'm a Red Hatter and I'm proud of it.

[1](full disclosure: I used to lead the SSSD project)

> The fact is we live in a rather thankless community and that is 
> something we might be better at something that Picard would indeed
> want us to do.
> 
> So I dont see how you can somehow make the assumption that all Red
> Hat employees have positive impact on the project.
> 
> Many of them do an many of them care but not all of them some are
> just doing this as part of their job.
> 
> JBG
> 
> 1.
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2013-June/008096.html
>
> 
2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=776033
> 3. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=777401 4.
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#Systemd
> 
> 

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