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Comment by Kaze404 | Hacker News Reader

There were no accusations. Someone asked a fair question. The maintainer clearly overreacted.

No, that question was asked in bad faith. By asking the question, you implying that there's a conflict of interest or some monetary motivation for the decision. If they truly wanted to ask a neutral question, something like "Given the for-profit nature and potential privacy concerns, why is Google's DNS the default instead of some other non-profit entity?"

> No, that question was asked in bad faith. By asking the question, you implying that there's a conflict of interest or some monetary motivation for the decision.

It's not bad faith to ask that question, when raising the issue previously got a complete non-answer that failed to acknowledge that there was a reason behind wanting different defaults. "Why didn't you answer the question the first time?" is fair game; Poettering provoked that response.

The defaults have kicked me in the genitals a number of times

Stuff magically failing, with no obvious reason why. The I realise that someone has cocked up the DNS config, its been silently rejected and is now defaulting back to the default DNS config.

I want it to fail, and fail loudly, not limp on and cause odd errors.

Been poorly worded doesn't make the question bad. Your example makes the exact same assumptions.

And they're fair assumptions - Google is well known for giving funding to open source projects to get their products set as defaults.

> Your example makes the exact same assumptions

My example does not make the assertion that Google donated/bribed the systemd project, so no, it does not make the same assumptions. It intentionally leaves any implied motivations open ended.

> And they're fair assumptions - Google is well known for giving funding to open source projects to get their products set as defaults.

The only case I'm aware of is Firefox, which had a contract with Mozilla to have the Google search engine be the default. I'm curious to hear about more though.

The privacy concerns with Google DNS seem to be partially unfounded too [1]. Granted, that is coming from Google themselves, but privacy policies are legally binding. For the record, I don't think there should be a default at all, but I have no problems with how Poettering handled this.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq#privacy

> With the above response, might I ask the developers a question: has this project received any donations from Google?

That sounds very accusatory to me. It’s just worded as a question.

Don't sound accusatory to me and only requires a one word response: No

Just mentioning Google or money does not an accusation make.

Uh... RedHat is owned by IBM.

Given:

1) how broadly Google spreads its money to open source projects to get its products set as defaults

2) that Redhat is a private company who does not disclose their funding sources

I think it's a perfectly reasonable question, given the situation (Google product set as a default in an open source project).

> that Redhat is a private company who does not disclose their funding sources

Red Hat's IPO was in 1999, and they were bought by IBM in 2019.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Did you read the link you posted? There's no shift of burden of proof, as all the maintainer would have to do is answer "No". I agree that there are people who do this in bad faith, but the question seemed totally reasonable to me.

> all the maintainer would have to do is answer "No"

That would technically be a lie. The answer is actually a qualified "yes".

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