Sharp: Closing a door [LWN.net]

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:49 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
In reply to: Sharp: Closing a door by pizza
Parent article: Sharp: Closing a door

> I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile. (Or forcing said change, in extreme cases).

Given the constant whining from the kernel community about the broken whole architecture trees are (because people don't want the hassle of committing upstream), or that the kernel just lost the only person who stepped up to make sure we got USB3 support, I would say there's plenty of support things are broken.

This fine publication has reported that one third of embedded developers don't upstream because of fear of rejection noting that "Kernel subsystem maintainers tend to be strict and terse with contributors [...] If a contributor gets a reputation for submitting bad patches and wasting maintainer time, their life will get worse."

If a third of developers would rather, in essence, throw aay their code than have to work with the upstream kernel developers, things are broken.

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Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:04 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

We might suppose that the Microsoft corporation, which won't even let you commit a fix that contains swear words or has anything less than complimentary to say about key partner brands, is a "friendlier" organisation to do business with in this rather limited sense.

A few seconds confirms that Microsoft's products do not have one third more upstreamed third party stuff. Quite the contrary, far more so than in Linux, everything is kept in-house and/ or thrown over the fence as unmaintainable binaries.

Laziness wins. Not every time, but overwhelmingly the true answer is "I couldn't be bothered" and what you can find out with a survey is "My currently favoured excuse for why I couldn't be bothered, PS I am goofing off to fill out this survey too".

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 7:17 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

I fail to see any point attempting a constructive conversation with someone whose response to evidence is to claim everyone is lying.

So, have fun ignoring what people are telling you and making up little fairy tales. It won't fix them problem, of course, but I guess getting to treat people like shit it more important than working code.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 19:37 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

So, Microsoft do have all this stuff? They're so friendly, surely they'd be falling over non-scared developers who, we've established have plenty of spare time and are extremely enthusiastic about handing this stuff over, they're just _terrified_ of upstreaming in Linux. No?

People lie in surveys. They lie in an anonymous psychology study. They lie in a corporate satisfaction survey. A properly conducted census actually has to be post-processed to compensate for this, or it won't reflect reality. Surveys aren't useless, but you should take them with a large dose of salt.

We have an actual data point from the real world, and it doesn't match what we might think we should learn from the survey. That doesn't automatically mean the survey is wrong, but it means we should be far more cautious than it seems you're willing to be. It isn't my goal to "treat people like shit" even the inevitable LWN guests who don't have a dime to pay for a subscription but do want to put in their tuppence about how Linux ought to be run. However I do care about working code. So show me the code.