[Leaplist] Novell employee on Kernel, GCC, X.org, Binutils, ALSA contributions ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

There's a lot of politics in this presentation,
but it also shows how much Red Hat does contribute
"across-the-board" -- and it was written by a
Novell employee no less:  
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/lpc_2008_keynote.html?seemore=y  

Now some would argue that non-corporate contributors,
but related to distro projects, or patches sent from
personal e-mails don't factor in.  In reality, if that
was taken into consideration, Fedora and other distro
contributors would only boost numbers more.  He did
try to do this for Debian, of which contributors do
not often submit from debian.org addresses.

With that said, I'm not going to comment on the
presenters focus other than to say one thing.

While I don't agree "exposing" a lot of this on one
vendor, that one vendor continually has employees
(not just fanboys) throwing around rhetoric that is
not remotely true.  I've repeatedly run into this
first hand, and it's only increasing.  They also dance
around with terms, mainly because people have started
to balk at their prices (and I even defended them in a
blog posting a few month back, hosted management and
SLAs will never be free as it costs people's time).

So while I have no problem with people enjoying the
popularity of a certain desktop distro, and even CEOs
of major Linux distros have stated that Linux adoption
helps us all, when you get the rhetoric, non-sense and over-statements from their employees, it tends to "get
on people's nerves."  Mainly the nerves of those
actually contributing code, and this company taking
credit for things they did not create.  It's at the
point that the unofficial means of "dealing" with them
is to work with Debian, instead of them.

Because, from that view, many have been echoing the
same thing -- they honestly don't "get" the concept
of open source.  I try to stay neutral on this, but I
can honestly see why many, major upstream contributors
are getting "tired" of the non-sense and rhetoric.
This gentleman is not the only one, and I've now seen
some really "bad moves" first hand with regards to them.

This is all in addition to the more subjective arguments
that other companies are "proprietary" and they are not.
That's more marketing, and less objective, and I try not
to entertain such, especially since I have clearly long
been a Fedora-Red Hat "apologist" myself.  But when it
comes to actual contributions to GPL, those matter.

As I always point out, use what you want, but when it
comes to actually paying for something, people should
consider how much every dollar they give a company goes
to develop more GPL.  That's my personal view, as always,
and where any of my own "biases" have always come from.


-- 
Bryan J Smith        Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
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       Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution

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