Bias

Posted Aug 30, 2016 20:51 UTC (Tue) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: Bias by corbet
Parent article: Böck: Multiple vulnerabilities in RPM – and a rant

It does sometimes feel to me like LWN has *slightly* disproportionate coverage of the Fedora project compared to, say, their Debian/Suse/Ubuntu coverage. Never been enough to bother me, though, or even to make me sure that this feeling isn't just my own biases showing. Just enough to make me suspect that it *may* be the system that a lot of the editorial staff uses.

(Wouldn't bother me much anyway, as I use RH professionally a lot—even though I have a mild preference for Debian for personal use—so I'm still interested in the Fedora stories. And for the record, I'm pretty good at putting together both rpms and debs, and I don't think either package format is noticeably better than the other.)

Bias

Posted Aug 30, 2016 21:14 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (12 responses)

There is no doubt that the amount of coverage we have is proportional to how open and visible a community's processes are. Fedora and Debian are the most open, so they tend to get the most attention. It's a lot harder to know what's going on inside the others.

Bias

Posted Aug 30, 2016 22:41 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (3 responses)

Hmm interesting.

How are Arch,Gentoo,Mageia,OpenSuse more closed then Fedora or Debian?

What about upstream community themselves which make up those distributions, is the perception of those feeling closed as well?

Bias

Posted Aug 31, 2016 5:55 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Consider, for example, the whole openSUSE Leap transition. The Fedora community would have argued about the concept for some time; openSUSE, instead, saw it announced in nearly its final form. So we didn't have a series of articles as the idea took shape; we had only one after it was announced.

The openSUSE community certainly makes itself heard on such things, but the governance is different, more centralized.

Bias

Posted Aug 31, 2016 8:19 UTC (Wed) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

Another example: have a look at the response from an Arch developer (back in 2012) when somebody requested a front-page announcement on whether Arch would be moving to systemd [1]:

> we usually don't announce things that are still being discussed or worked on. People who are interested in development and future plans should read arch-dev-public

that would never happen in Debian, where there was an enormous entire-community relatively democratic discussion about that, and it took forever to resolve. Arch, instead, is run by a cabal of a half-dozen developers and barely listen to the community; and most of us who use Arch like it that way :) the `official' explanation for moving to systemd is still this forum post [2].

[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1148067#p1148067
[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

Bias

Posted Sep 1, 2016 1:33 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

Most of these distributions are using one form or another of the benevolent dictator model, in which a person ( slackware/Patrick ), group of persons ( Arch and probably Gentoo as well, the package maintainers ) or an company ( Redhat/Fedora,OpenSuse/Suse,Canonical) decides the project or distribution direction then *announces* what he/she/they or it has decided in different transparent manner in those community. The case with the announcement from (Open)Suse just shows they are honest about owning the component that make up SLES unlike Redhat.

In the end of the day I think there exist only two primary distributions ( as in not derivatives ) that are truly community driven ( as in are not bound by the BD motel in one form or another thus arguably are the only one that can truly call themselves community driven distributions ) and those are Debian and Mageia which makes them the distribution in which individual contribution gain the most value of their contributed time.

If you and the rest of the writers here on lwn would have a saying how would you and the rest of the writers here envision project and distribution approaching media?

Bias

Posted Aug 31, 2016 6:04 UTC (Wed) by mrdocs (guest, #21409) [Link] (7 responses)

Jon,

Having been a SUSE Enterprise customer first, then openSUSE member for more than 10 years and working for SUSE now for 4, I have to say how can we help our distinguished editor's knowledge of our community ?

I think partly SUSE (note SuSE has been deprecated some ten years ago), does not get the same attention being originally a German and very engineering focused company. It is changing, but as someone from the states, you do notice this tendency still manifests itself still. openSUSE marches to its own drumbeat and will on occasion make decisions which do not align strictly to SUSE business, but this not just tolerated, but encouraged.

In sum, an offer to connect you to the SUSE/openSUSE world :)

Bias

Posted Aug 31, 2016 12:27 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (6 responses)

What is needed is what Jon mentioned. Communities need to be transparent for the style of reporting that LWN has cultivated for 15+ years. LWN does not seem to take 'leads' or 'insider information' fed it from people inside of an organization. LWN seems to reports what is open if they attended the same event or discussion group. I also believe that LWN has turned down where it would get exclusive information. That means that a community has to be more than just inviting corbet or someone to it.. it needs to have most of its discussions in a way that Corbet, et al could listen to them without having special access.

Please do not take this as a statement that Fedora is some sort of paragon that other OS's should emulate. We have plenty of warts and should do better.

Bias

Posted Aug 31, 2016 14:08 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (5 responses)

I would put it slightly differently.

If you make a decision on private or semi-private lists and then publish that decision, then LWN will have one blurb article about the decision with a link to the announcement of the decision.

If you debate and discusses it on public lists with lots of input before making a decision, then LWN will have one blurb article about the decision with a link to the announcement, but it ALSO may have one or more full-length articles discussing the process of making the decision and providing summaries of the various positions and reasoning. Because in our F/OSS world the process of developing software and arriving at consensus is often at least as, if not more, interesting than the actual result of that process.

Bias

Posted Aug 31, 2016 16:21 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Yes agreed. Your wording is much better than mine. +1 Patch accepted and pushed :).

Bias

Posted Aug 31, 2016 18:36 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

It's also worth considering that when those discussions turn into arguments- which is pretty often for the most contentious issues- the news about them can wind up sounding negative. Not all publicity is necessarily good publicity, and airing your decision making process with all its flaws is a good example.

Bias

Posted Sep 2, 2016 0:27 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, the openSUSE community does its discussions on public lists.
It debates *a* *LOT* there.

Decisions are also made and communicated very openly on these discussion lists.
I can confirm that because the lates public discussions and decisions made me turn away from openSUSE -- after having used the stuff since S.u.S.E 4.2 in 1996 -- and believe me, it needs some time to turn your back on a distribution you used for 19+ years.

Thus, the almost non-existant coverage on openSUSE developments has nothing to do with private or semi-private lists. It's all very public. In fact, that few to no reports about OBS exist -- the best thing that the openSUSE/SUSE community ever produced -- are sad.

And that's just about the community that I know about because I used it not long ago. I assume Gentoo or Arch folks can report similar stories.
So yes, I percieve a clear Fedora/RH bias in LWN.net reporting. [*] It doesn't bother me, though. I don't know if the resources are available to remedy it, and I don't know if the resources would be well spent.

Nevertheless, here's the best place to go for Linux News once a week, and there will be no better place. :-) :-)

Cheers, Joachim

[*] Please don't get me wrong. h2 is nuts. Or, more probably, since he doesn't even have a proper account, he's a plain troll. Here's to the LWN.net community that they respond to a troll with proper discussion about percieved or actual biases and about inviting responses if they really exist or if they are felt to exist.

Bias

Posted Sep 2, 2016 7:40 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Again, what was public about openSUSE Leap, for example? Once it became public, we covered it, but the decision had already been made at that point.

We have no desire to discriminate against any distribution (or other project for that matter). I do follow the openSUSE lists; I'm even running openSUSE on my desktop machine. I'll look harder for potential topics in the future, I guess...

Bias

Posted Sep 2, 2016 13:47 UTC (Fri) by StefanBr (guest, #110916) [Link]

I think the discussion which lead to Leap started in this ML list thread:

[opensuse-factory] Road-map for openSuse 13.3?
https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2015-04/msg00...

which went on till end of may, so for more than a month.

In May 2015, during osC 2015 Richard Brown did two relevant presentations, slides available here:
https://speakerdeck.com/sysrich
https://speakerdeck.com/sysrich/opensuse-vision
https://speakerdeck.com/sysrich/the-future-is-unwritten

The ML discussion continued here:
[opensuse-factory] openSUSE:42
https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2015-06/msg00...

The name Leap appeared really late in the cycle, see here for a summary (2015-06-30):
Re: [opensuse-factory] How to name the baby -- A Summary
https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2015-06/msg00...

AFAIK, the *name* was selected by the openSUSE board after the ML discussion.

The availability of Leap was also the result of the SLES sources being available in the OBS, someone picking up what was available and creating a POC, and naming the POC openSUSE:42.

So the (apparent) lack of discussion prior to openSUSE:42 is due to the fact someone just did the first setup, the result which was very welcomed by most openSUSE community members.

A lot of discussion likely happened during osC 2015 (unfortunately I did no attend), and future directions where discussed again during osC 2016. Slides and videos are public.