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Comment by obsurveyor | Hacker News Reader

There's also a response from someone at System76 here: https://plus.google.com/+CassidyJames/posts/RDKMJtGoX62

> Classy. That's a great, professional way to build relationships and really makes people want to work with you on your project.

That's.... not how this should be handled. Unsure this person's position, but if they're high enough to matter, that's not the position they should be taking here, regardless of their feelings on the matter.

They also didn't address the technical parts of the article besides saying "it will probably work though we haven't tested it". They didn't discuss the reason for the degradation of communication, nor the particulars of the decisions made, or even acknowledge the scenario the article outlined, instead talking about the author negatively.

It sounds like the "breakdown in communication" amounts to the LVFS maintainer not being informed, as everyone is naturally obliged to do so(!), that System76 were adopting a different strategy, and according to this reply due to a simple matter of commercial priority. Maintainer continues by indicating they do not require an apology, after all, everyone is obliged to inform them of all matters firmware!

I didn't like the attitude in the original post, and I can understand why there is a little spice in System76's reply. Recommending a competing laptop brand over an issue as trivial as an alternative BIOS update mechanism that doesn't match Microsoft's compliance requirements seems like seriously sour grapes.

It seems they expect System76 to invent an in-house firmware update system that does not use the official mechanism supplied by their chipset's support package, and somehow this is automatically a better outcome than what existed already.

Maintainer should be reminded that toiling for free (presumably) on an important subsystem grants no special rights or entitlements, and lashing out at a vendor because they didn't toe an ideal line looks very immature

edit: sadly maintainer isn't even working for free, they're a Red Hat employee

To be clear, I wasn't making a comment on the tone of the original author. I tend to agree with you about the tone, but that person is not a company and is therefore held to slightly different standards. As far as the Microsoft thing, my read of that was that it was a vehicle for saying "everyone else already does this, it's the norm and expectation of consumers, don't be weird and proprietary" rather than wanting to bring in anything about Windows or whatever, especially since the article was talking about Linux distros. I have no ponies in this race, but I found System76's response very poor.

For what it's worth, that was my personal response and not anything official or reviewed by System76 "the company." I try to retain a bit of autonomy while working for Sytem76.

I agree that my tone may have been a little unprofessional itself, and that's on me. It has just been a frustrating time trying to do what's best for both our customers and the Linux ecosystem at large, and then being raked across the coals for it with a misleading and seemingly emotional blog post from a core Red Hat desktop employee and high-profile GNOME contributor. It's just not a fun thing to wake up to when you're also actively working with the guy on his other projects and contributing to GNOME itself, you know?

We all get frustrated, I get it. I've found a good rule of thumb for those types of situations is thinking about how the post would look if you said "I work at $COMPANY and directly represent them". Even if you don't include that copy in your posts (which larger companies enforce, see the typical "I work at X" disclaimers all over HN), it helps frame how your post may be interpreted.

Yay drama! Why act like adults when we can squabble.

It sounds like the folks at System76 have a limited amount of resources available and this is not an immediate priority for them. That's understandable considering the last 6 months have been a security shit show. I mean sure why not overhaul your firmware delivery system on top of everything else?

It also sounds like Richard is butt hurt that they didn't notify him of their priorities. And so he passive aggressively wrote a public blog post trivializing the amount of effort it was going to take to switch and then advised people not to purchase their products. That's kind of petty.

I find it really insulting when someone tells me how long it will take me to do something without knowing what constraints I'm forced to work under, so the "just a few hours" remarks annoyed me.

I don't see him talking about the closed source flashing tool afuefi, which seemed to be the reason for the hickup in working together.

Richard's post made it clear that they didn't need to use it, they should be able to use UpdateCapsule.

As someone who've never heard of LVFS or System76, this response seems to be a bit unprofessional to me. He opens and ends with passive-aggressiveness, he points to 2 tweets as if saying "How did you not see these 2 tweets!" Well okay one of them is his reply to the original blog poster's reply to another thread, but a random non-commital tweet after several months of radio silence seems unprofessional too.

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