Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaat | Hacker News Reader

Is Gnome driven by Red Hat? According to the project site the board and the advisory boards are not controlled by Red Hat employees, the Gnome foundation president isn't from Red Hat either, and the project is a GNU project.

Same question regarding to Wayland, from a shorter check I see that it is developed by the freedesktop.org which was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat 21 years ago but it is seems that it isn't really under Red Hat control nowadays.

View on HN

It's hard to escape being de facto controlled by the entity that's providing the overwhelming majority of your development resources. The board doesn't have the time or expertise to take a position on deep technical questions, and the main contributors are Red Hat employees with a Red Hat worldview.

Red Hat is also the main contributor to the linux kernel, almost every year. Red Hat is probably the company with the largest contribution to the open source world at large, and it's been that way before most of the other big players of today were born.

You're bringing logic into this, please stop. The propaganda narrative is to just bash Red Hat for any work done. Of course the company that employs many opensource people across the world is going to have some effect on the ecosystem.

The really funny part is that people think there is some metaphorical gun to developers heads to use this technology. There is a choice, there always has been.

> The really funny part is that people think there is some metaphorical gun to developers heads to use this technology. There is a choice, there always has been.

Of course, but when the choices are "support A and B for C" or "support A and B for C but now it'll be a ton of extra work to package and maintain because C deliberately cut out A (and every other alternative that's not B)... or drop A and only support B for C, which is becoming popular fast anyway because it has lots of money behind it" then those two sets of choices aren't exactly the same.

"There's a choice" doesn't mean the choices & options aren't being nudged pretty hard.

> You're bringing logic into this, please stop. The propaganda narrative is to just bash Red Hat for any work done. Of course the company that employs many opensource people across the world is going to have some effect on the ecosystem.

I used to like them a lot, but at some point noticed I dislike an awful lot of the ways they influence the Linux desktop, and the tech they push, often by intertwining the projects they have influence over and driving them in ways that practically exclude and marginalize alternatives. If they changed I'd change my opinion. But yeah, I'm probably just some sort of simpleton.

These kind of comments are really baffling to me. If they have no interest or investment whatsoever in A, then what are they supposed to do? Can you blame any distribution for not wanting to put in all that extra work to package and maintain it themselves, for every single other piece of open source out there that someone might have a passing interest in? It's a business, they don't have infinite money to spend towards everyone's side project on Github. I wish they did but sadly, they don't.

I get that you feel excluded and marginalized but those may be misplaced emotions, if you were never a paying customer or a developer then you were probably never part of the club. It's just some company posting free stuff online, and you're welcome to take it or leave it.

> These kind of comments are really baffling to me. If they have no interest or investment whatsoever in A, then what are they supposed to do? Can you blame any distribution for not wanting to put in all that extra work to package and maintain it themselves, for every single other piece of open source out there that someone might have a passing interest in? It's a business, they don't have infinite money to spend towards everyone's side project on Github. I wish they did but sadly, they don't.

Were my terms too abstract? Systemd is written such that it's a pain in the ass to keep the multiple options for the several systems it replaces around, if a piece of software that's very important decides to go all-in on Systemd. Gnome did exactly this. Before that happened this problem did not exist. Systemd + Gnome created the problem, for any distros that wants to package them, forcing them to choose between a bunch of extra work or marginalizing anything that's not systemd. I'm not talking about "side projects on GH" but the ability to, practically, not theoretically, replace important parts a Linux system at all, or to write a new implementation that does things usefully-different from existing options because the spec is reasonably broad and the system loosely-coupled. Those are on their way out, and that's on purpose. Side projects on GH indeed. Haha. I think I see where the disconnect is, yeah. Maybe we're talking about totally different things?

> I get that you feel excluded and marginalized but those may be misplaced emotions, if you were never a paying customer or a developer then you were probably never part of the club.

Rad, I'll stop having an opinion or even noticing things that are happening because I'm not part of... what club is this? HN posters couching insults in armchair psychology to try to evade downvotes? Is that the club?

I completely disagree with your comment and I'm not talking about different things. There are a lot of side projects on Github to replace various parts of a Linux system, and various parts of systemd. They exist. What else were you talking about? When you want to replace something then you have to re-implement all its functionality. Systemd isn't any harder to replace than anything else, and it certainly didn't create the problem that someone has to actually put in the work to write the replacement. If it feels like too much extra work, then maybe ask yourself if it's really worth it to replace it to begin with? What are you really getting out of it?

The "club" is people who were invested in that particular project. If you're just a free user and you didn't have an active investment in pushing the project forward, then you're not in that club. Sorry, I don't mean to be blunt and I'm not trying to insult you, but the honest truth is that your opinion doesn't really matter unless you have the resources or the clout to push it forward. And if you did, then you'd be the one running the company, and then people would be complaining about how you're marginalizing them. Again I don't meant to be rude here or shut down your opinions or anything but let's just be real. Someone's got to foot the bill eventually, and when you're that person you get to be the one who says no, and then everyone else gets to be mad at you.

> I'm not talking about different things. There are a lot of side projects on Github to replace various parts of a Linux system, and various parts of systemd. They exist. What else were you talking about?

So, we are talking about different things? Because most of the things I'm talking about pre-date Github.

> The "club" is people who were invested in that particular project. If you're just a free user and you didn't have an active investment in pushing the project forward, then you're not in that club. Sorry, I don't mean to be blunt and I'm not trying to insult you, but the honest truth is that your opinion doesn't really matter unless you have the resources or the clout to push it forward. And if you did, then you'd be the one running the company, and then people would be complaining about how you're marginalizing them. Again I don't meant to be rude here or shut down your opinions or anything but let's just be real. Someone's got to foot the bill eventually, and when you're that person you get to be the one who says no, and then everyone else gets to be mad at you.

Sweet, so I'm the everyone else who gets to be mad. Glad we agree I get to. For fuck's sake, I'm just pointing out a pattern of behavior a corporation is engaging in, which may be used to predict other things they may do. This is bizarre.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com