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> That is not how large organizations work.

Wikipedia indicates they employ 21 people. That could be off by an order of magnitude and it still wouldn't qualify as a "large organization."

Hmm I wonder how many employees s76 actually has? because in the reply from s76 it hints towards a rather larger company than 21 people.

"System76 is also focusing on several other time-intensive efforts (like building a US-based manufacturing plant, designing in-house products, and building a well-received GNOME-based OS for both System76 customers and any interested users)"

Like shit if they are designing and building a manufacturing plant with 21 people in house whilst also maintaining normal business selling and maintaining hardware... My hat goes off to them...for either being amazing or being so crazy stupid to think they could pull it off!

Building a US-based manufacturing plant is an SVP endeavor with another company offloading 90% of the design work. Been there, done that.

Designing in-house products is what they already do, and have done prior to Pop! so this shouldn't take user level app developer time that could be spent on better support for their users.

Building yet another distro is a waste of time and effort and only undermines goodwill with their users (I bought a Galago Pro to run Arch, and Pop came out 6 months after I received it -- I don't want yet another vendor controlled os). When Pop came out, they retargeted efforts around supporting only that system, leaving user choice by the wayside. The end result is that it burned me in the form of a missed firmware update that killed my battery, and customer support responses that boiled down to "run Pop!".

It's one thing to want to do something crazy -- it's quite another to hurt your customers in the process.

I'm literally on the factory floor right now, working with our designers and CEO on upcoming product designs. There's an area populated with a few dozen iterations of unreleased prototypes from the past couple of years, a couple of 3D printers running for prototype parts, as well as a laser cutting acrylic for new prototypes chassis today.

We're doing this work in-house, right here in Denver, Colorado.

I'm sorry you had a poor experience with support. We do still offer a choice between Ubuntu and Pop!_OS right from the site, but we also are focusing our efforts on making better products. And a large part of that (which we hear from our customers every day) is in the software experience. You're always welcome to install whatever you want on your machine, and we'll do our best to help you out with that.

How about focusing on making your firmware updates deliver via the existing, well established lvfs instead of some "not invented here" home grown bullshit, so I can use the distro I want, not Ubuntu or that other thing I never heard of before without being denied those updates?

That sounds like a massive oversell of LVFS.

The site has barely been up 3 years given the notice at the bottom, while System76 have been selling preinstalled Linux computers for over a decade.

Eh, that's not that surprising. Making your team or company sound larger than it is in an effort to sound more legitimate or established is a time-honored tradition.

What kind of manufacturing plant is the question. Competing with Intel and a processor design and fab house is obviously beyond all but the largest companies. I suspect even designing a motherboard is beyond a company of their size (or even an order of magnitude larger). However it probably makes sense for them to do final assembly so they can integrate quality assurance steps where required. Take a case somebody else made (their design), a bunch of other components (mostly off the shelf, but some custom), and screw them together. At several points along the way power up the system and run some tests.

I don't think I can share intimate details, but we are designing the products, manufacturing the chassis and some internal components, and assembling the products all in Denver, CO.

Come on, don't be silly, only the world's largest 5 or 10 companies build their own processors; look how long it took apple to build their own arm. They will use an amd or intel cpu and put pieces together.

They could be off by two orders of magnitude and not qualify. 2100 is not what I would consider large by any stretch.

> I don’t require an apology, and would happily create them a OEM account on the LVFS

He is specifically not demanding an apology, and is explicitly saying he is happy to continue to work with them.

It implies that someone owes an apology or at least an apology is fitting but the author is willing to forgo it.

Well, it sounds like they ignored his emails for 6 months, which their point of contact with him did apologize for in the reddit thread.

And he's butt hurt that they shipped without LVFS so he's publicly admonishing them, trivializing the effort, and telling people to boycott their products.

But at least he's willing to work with them.

He doesn't sound particularly aggrieved, and he's not telling people to boycott their products.

> I don’t actually mind if System76 doesn’t use fwupd and the LVFS, I just don’t want people to buy new hardware and be disappointed.

As someone uninvolved who occasionally looks at linux laptops, this is really useful information for me. One of the (apparently) core developers of (apparently) a tool that allows cross hardware compatibility for linux is saying "this laptop does not adequately support arbitrary versions of linux, and they don't have a compelling technical reason why".

The post is not about spreading information, but attacking them for not using LVFS.

If what the author wanted to do was simply to spread information, the post would have been the length of a single Twitter post:

    Make note: System76 uses a custom fw update util only bundled with "Pop_OS!".

The entirety about this post is to hang System76 out for their process and decision, explaining how they are wrong, and how the author is willing to forgive them for this wrongdoing without the apology the author feels is in place. The post is nothing but emotional.

(I have no strong opinion about System76's decision, but I find this post format to be awful.)

Interesting that disinterested parties here are coming to such different conclusions.

If sharing the process issues was valueless, it would definitely seem personal. But it doesn't seem valueless for me. When making informed judgement about which companies to throw in with, their process matters.

It's like MongoDB from days of yore. There was someone who reported a bug and the mongo team were jerks about it. I've specifically chosen not to use Mongo because of that interaction. Don't want my projects hinging on dev teams with good marketing sense but poor communication skills. Don't want my hardware depending on vendors who can't make nice with the FOSS community.

It is interesting, although not that surprising. Human languages are awfully imprecise means of communication. :)

I agree that sharing process is important, and your MongoDB example is a good one (not that I am short on reason to not use MongoDB).

However, I don't find the post to describe System76 processes beyond "there was email communication", and that progress towards a goal aligning with the author's preferences was suspended. The only thing I can conclude from it is that the author is in disagreement with System76.

From the format of the post, I would quite frankly be biased towards assuming that the problem lies with the post author. This assumption is of course not based on tangible evidence, which would require access to the email exchange to obtain.

Obviously we only heard one side of the story here, but from personal experience I can sympathise with him.

You're trying to work with that company, help them to use your platform. There might already be some personal attachment here if you really believe in the platform you created and take personal pride in every OEM hopping on board, but even if he just believes in the "greater good" of having this unified experience on Linux I can see how he wants this to happen.

Then there is Apparently some capable person at system76 who reverse engineered the proprietary updater they had to use before, and this is where things start going wrong. This is the part I have experienced personally on both sides. The system76 guy gets a great ego trip out of his achievements, somehow management/marketing hears about it and together they brainstorm how they can build their own independent update infrastructure. Marketing sees their unique selling point, dev sees exciting new things to create, feels like internet super hero, tells lvfs how shitty their whole approach to this is since super-dev has so much more insight into how this should be done properly.

I definitely agree how an achievement can cloud judgement and lead to something akin to an ego-trip. We've all been there.

However, two inputs to this. One is that it appears that S76 had to work to do in order to become compatible with LVFS, and ended up just extending this to the point where they had an updater. Two, I can't possibly imagine anyone considering a custom firmware updater a selling point, especially not at the cost of not getting the free labor of having someone else maintain both tools and infrastructure.

I kinda suspect we were dealing with a "Hmm, we could just sprinkle a bit of UI on this and then move on to other tasks", knowing that it was suboptimal, but not finding the issue important for the time schedule.

When I cut corners as a programmer at work, it's usually due to time constraints, priorities or annoying customers, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of developers and managers alike...

Did he attempt to reach out to them via email to get a status update? It doesn't sound like it, he just went straight to whining on a blog.

He was given a notification by System76 back in January that we were busy with moving into the new warehouse, hardware testing, and developing our 18.04 release. Getting our firmware to work with his tool is not a high priority.

The warning that I can't run any linux distro I want is pretty fair. The blog post so he doesn't have to write a new email each time is also fair.

He could have just said "I was working with System76 in April of last year on implementing LVFS but they went dark and shipped with a proprietary tool, I'm not sure what happened but I'm disappointed. If you're interested in running a distro other than what they're shipping you might want to consider a different OEM."

Instead he went over their email exchanges and trivialized the amount of work they need to invest to change systems and what they needed to do to rectify the situation. Oh but they're no need to apologize, just right the injustice.

He completely ignores the fact that they're a business with external motivators driving their decision (i.e. needed to ship, Meltdown, Spectre) and he just complains that they left him hanging.

Sure they could have sent him an email giving him a heads up on what was going on and why they were tabling the LVFS implementation but this sort of thing happens all the time in industry.

Yeah, this is fair. One nit-pick is that the System76 firmware tool is not proprietary at all; the blobs themselves are (just like almost every other consumer product), but the firmware updater is all completely open source. It's just not LVFS.

We hope to make this all a moot point with completely open firmware in the future, but that's a long and difficult road we're on.

Is afuefi now open source?

Nah, it is a passive-aggressive turn of phrase to try to make System76 look bad by being the "lesser" party.

It is the kind of crap one would expect from a project spawned of the Gnome camp...

How did:

> I don’t require an apology

Get turned into:

> [...] this demand for apology nonsense [...]

When someone says "you don't need to apologize" it implies an apology is customary/necessary given the situation but the wronged party has decided to forgo formalities and just wants to move past the wrong and move forward with making it right.

Richard basically says "you don't need to apologize, just implement LVFS". This implies that the wrong which necessitated an apology was not shipping LVFS which is not the case. The only apology they might owe him is for not notifying him of the reason why they chose not to ship LVFS after spending time with him investigating using it.

This situation is like spending the day with a car salesman and then leaving without buying a car when the salesman takes a potty break. Then the car salesman runs a TV commercial that says "<you> wasted my time. I don't need an apology though, just buy one of my cars."

He said he doesn't need apology, because someone at System76 had already apologized on the reditt thread.

If that's the case then the matter should be closed. System76 was under no obligation to ship with LVFS support and it slipped due to other constraints.

I've been reading through posts on Reddit seeing if I could get a better understanding of the timing of what happened, if anything it's worse now but it seems that Richard's principal contact at System76 held off on notifying him until the release was finalized and is no longer with the company. (https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8i6swc/system76_and_...) It's unclear if he left before or after the release.

Judging by the all of the inaccuracies in Richard's blog post about the timing of announcements, nature of the application, and the platforms it supports, which all reflect poorly on System76 and benefit his argument; I'm inclined to agree that this is a FUD campaign to shame System76 into supporting LVFS. If you take into account his blog history of shaming companies (e.g. Razer), and his speaking about himself in the third person on reddit; Richard really sounds like a self important twat who is trying to strong arm everyone into using his software.