Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source [LWN.net]

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 1, 2011 23:05 UTC (Tue) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source by paravoid
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Thank you for pointing that out.

When Jon Corbet first started doing his analysis of who made kernel X... and it became an ongoing feature... I emailed him to ask why Debian didn't show up... if it was because they are harder to identify... or if it was because they don't contribute as much to kernel development. It was a while ago and I'm not quoting... but I believe he said... as far as he could tell they weren't contributing to the things he was measuring.

I don't think the Debian development community cares as much about getting credit... but it wouldn't be a bad thing for them to make some effort to become more measurable in such surveys... if they are indeed contributing more than they are being credit with. I'm not sure what that would take but I'm guessing those doing the measuring could give some valuable clues.

I certainly would like to see the Debian developers get credit for the work they do.

to post comments

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 2, 2011 0:22 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (3 responses)

It seems to me that there is an apples-and-oranges comparison here.

Redhat are a software distributor and a development house and a support service (and probably other things).

Debian is a software distribution.

The kernel patches from "redhat" are almost certainly mostly from the "development house" side of redhat. There is no corresponding part of Debian.

I really don't expect 'Debian' to contribute much in the way of kernel patches (though I suspect they channel their fair share of bug reports, which are just as valuable). When individuals who happen to be Debian developers also happen to do kernel development I suspect they are not doing so as a "Debian developer" but in some other role (employee of some company, independent enthusiast or whatever).

As a software distributor you might expect Debian to appear in surveys such as "how widely used" or "user preference" or "number of packages" or "number of bug reports" or "frequency of releases", and I thing Debian does OK in most of those.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 2, 2011 5:36 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, and there is no organization called "Debian" paying developers so they can work full time on the kernel. There certainly are Debian developers making significant contributions all over the place, but the RHEL revenue is making it possible for many people to do nothing else but work on free software.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 4, 2011 8:07 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Your point being?

My point would be that they didn't invent the wheel (i..e the kernel) here. There got to where they are now because lots of others play by the rules and don't obfuscate their code, or its origins.

While Oracle doesn't play nice with Open Source, kowtowing to their level of "this is our code, whether the community likes it or not" boneheadedness and doing essentially the same thing is not the way forward: Oracle isn't going to change its business practice because of what Red Hat does or doesn't do with its kernel patches.

Summary: This step benefits nobody.

It may even hurt Red Hat directly, if a couple of their kernel people get disgusted enough about this attitude that they leave.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 5, 2011 15:32 UTC (Sat) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

When individuals who happen to be Debian developers also happen to do kernel development I suspect they are not doing so as a "Debian developer" but in some other role (employee of some company, independent enthusiast or whatever).

I work on the kernel as a Debian developer, fixing bugs where I can see how to and occasionally developing features that are important to Debian and its users. I also work on the kernel as an employee of Solarflare, but this is a pretty well separate role, as my employer does not use or claim to support Debian.