Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 17, 2019 9:41 UTC (Thu) by Gladrim (subscriber, #45751)
Parent article: Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

What is the benefit to the end user? Are any users demanding this?

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 17, 2019 22:58 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (16 responses)

None what so ever other than having the joy of having it's privacy invaded...

This information is only benefitial to IBM/Red hat so it can focus on what it should focus it's resources on...

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 18, 2019 15:45 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Although you put it in a weirdly negative light (and given the actual plan, "privacy invasion" seems like QUITE a stretch), yes, having better information helps us as a project talk to our sponsors about resources. I definitely want that. But this won't just be available internally — the goal is to make a site like https://metrics.opensuse.org/. Anyone in the project will be able to benefit from the information. Or, if they want, to completely ignore it and do the thing they care about.

Number of systems running, is, of course, just one factor. I don't think there are many people running Fedora Robotics — but the people who do run it do stuff like https://www.electronicspecifier.com/robotics/why-no-one-c..., which is super awesome.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 22, 2019 11:51 UTC (Tue) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (14 responses)

Wouldn't it be infinitely more useful for Redhat/IBM to know what their customers and potential customers are willing to pay for?

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 22, 2019 12:58 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (13 responses)

Is IBM/Redhat not directing it's customers towards it's implementations in Fedora.

The Fedora is beta platform for Red hat mantra, which dictade and decides the direction of the project and treats it's community as a second class citizen.

What get picked up and works in Fedora ( thus needs to be measuarble in Fedora ) gets integraded into the RHEL stack.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 22, 2019 17:30 UTC (Tue) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link] (12 responses)

> What get picked up and works in Fedora ( thus needs to be measuarble in Fedora ) gets integraded into the RHEL stack.

Except this is distro implementation level stuff. Presumably RH already knows how many server, VM, or (God help you) Desktop systems you're running since you're paying licenses for it, even if you're not using RHN for lifecycle management.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 22, 2019 21:59 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (11 responses)

It knows everything about it's own customer base but not the path for $NEXT RHEL release.

And as things are evolving ( everything is being pre-built upstream, flatpacks, docker images etc ) there is always becoming less and less incentive for end users even administrators who need to start clinching themselve to cloud solution to make a name for themselves in related communities ( they participate in ansible galaxy not ansible in Fedora right ) to partake in downstream distributions.

Being first is something that Fedora has not been for years, The features are nothing more than those that Red Hat pushes fourth, The only real freedom you have is to choose whether you partake in the distribution or not so the only remaining things of the foundation that Fedora was built upon is friends.

What once was a birth mark has grown into a tumor because the balance between Red Hat's involvement and the community has been tipped too much in favour towards Red Hat, something I warned Denise about would happen if she would throw more Red Hatters at the problem as opposide to say no you have find ways to make due with what you have, get the community rise to the occation when Red Hatters came running to mommy begging for more resources.

It's a fine line to keep in check so that either of these forces dont dominate the other.
An skill that Red Hat or someone(s) understood and had mastered within Red Had and made what Red Hat is today, an skill that Red Hat has lost ( atleast with regards to Fedora ) or those that had it moved to build communities somewhere else *cough* Ansible *cough*...

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 22, 2019 23:37 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (8 responses)

> What once was a birth mark has grown into a tumour because the balance between Red Hat's involvement and the community has been tipped too much in favour towards Red Hat

Um, hasn't Red Hat has always provided the lion's share of the funding (and thus, developers) working on Fedora?

Don't those who do the actual work (or pay for it) ultimately get to set the direction of that work?

It's not like FHEL & Fedora are the only games in town; there's plenty of distribution-level competition, encompassing a wide spectrum of focus, release, funding and governance models.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 1:24 UTC (Wed) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link]

> It's not like RHEL & Fedora are the only games in town; there's plenty of distribution-level competition, encompassing a wide spectrum of focus, release, funding and governance models.

Well, yes and no. Corporate world is RPM-based. Developers love the Debian/Ubuntu ecosystem. Embeddeds have their own needs.

If we had stronger competition in the RPM ecosystem, I think whatever Fedora ends up being would be a stronger project. Instead we have this weird process of passive-aggressive interaction where the distracted flagship community project is not functioning as a reliable steward.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 6:14 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (4 responses)

So what you are saying is that gold and platinum sponsors in communities and conference should dictade and decide which direction those community take, to which level and what talks are given ( which would always favour said corpirate?

I most certanly disagree but if it's corporate that allows for other to get involved without interference with it's products until the corporate takes interest in your work, in which they either take over your work by overwhelming you with workforce or simply buy it or out it out if does not align with said corporate vision, with end result being always the same. The corporate will take it from here, then I agree with you.

Quite frankly i'm amazed that lawsuit hungry colonists that the Americans are, that Red Hat has not been suit over an violation of the consumer act regarding Fedora there in the states but then again i'm not a laywer...

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 12:20 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

>So what you are saying is that gold and platinum sponsors in communities and conference should dictade and decide which direction those community take

Everyone participating in Fedora, or indeed any other community, is acting in their own self-interest. I don't mean they're out to screw others in the process, but rather that they are getting something they value out of it.

Meanwhile. Have you ever participated in any sort of formal organization? Those who participate get to dictate what goes on. And those who have the most time/energy to contribute particpate the most. And who has the most time/energy? Those paid to particpate. (Because participating doesn't take time away from such mundane things like feeding their families..)

> I most certanly disagree but if it's corporate that allows for other to get involved without interference with it's products until the corporate takes interest in your work, in which they either take over your work by overwhelming you with workforce or simply buy it or out it out if does not align with said corporate vision, with end result being always the same. The corporate will take it from here, then I agree with you.

It's Free Software. If you have a problem with (certain) others using it, or building on it in a way you don't like, then you should have released it under a different license.

> Quite frankly i'm amazed that lawsuit hungry colonists that the Americans are, that Red Hat has not been suit over an violation of the consumer act regarding Fedora there in the states but then again i'm not a laywer...

Winning a suit requires demonstrating someone has been tangibly harmed. I'm having a hard time seeing the harm RH has caused. And, for that matter, even the someone.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 13:22 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

You do realize there is a difference between sponsorship and dictatorship right?

Fedora is falsely being advertised as something it's not which could constitute as deliberate deception on Red Hats belhalf.

And there are alternatives than forking off.
It's not the only option as you make out to be.
Red Hat could publicly admit that this is the case or it could change it's involvement in a manner in which the community is not treaded like second class citizens.

Or now that IBM is at the helm it could do something that Red Hat never could or even might have too so it's own products dont get the same treatment as the community made once. ( IBM could make things worse, only time will tell )

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 16:16 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> You do realize there is a difference between sponsorship and dictatorship right?

It's only a difference of degree.

> And there are alternatives than forking off.

Of course. But *every* alternative, including a fork, requires a substantial (and sustained!) increase in time, effort, and money from non-RedHat folks. To pretend otherwise is nothing short of delusional.

> Red Hat could publicly admit that this is the case or it could change it's involvement in a manner in which the community is not treaded like second class citizens.

What would that entail, exactly? Red Hat no longer funding developers and infrastructure for the things they care about? Or are you honestly trying to say that folks (regardless of who signs their paycheck) should be forced to work on things they don't care about? (Keep in mind that handing over a paycheck tends to greatly increase the likelihood of someone caring)

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 18:30 UTC (Wed) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link]

> > And there are alternatives than forking off.
> Of course. But *every* alternative, including a fork, requires a substantial (and sustained!) increase in time, effort, and money from non-RedHat folks. To pretend otherwise is nothing short of delusional.

And this is the crux of the problem. Forking Fedora is a lot of time, effort, and money to achieve -- an unknown purpose. There's only one Rawhide, and there's only one central upstream for RPM systems. And, again, people use RHEL for reliability and scale. Forking Fedora and try to make a new RHEL out of it (with all the certifications, process, vendor support, etc) would be basically pointless.

Forking EL (either as a rebuild of RHEL in parallel with CentOS, or a rebuild of CentOS) might make more sense (it makes sense for Oracle, and Amazon), but now you're three steps removed from being able to influence any low-level changes in the upstream. You can barely get devel@fedora to care about EPEL these days, so you can be sure derivatives will... continue to be told to pound sand.

Until the philosophical problems with Fedora/Rawhide/RHEL and CentOS/*EL are solved, which really requires an Official Red Hat Plan Of Action, as the organization behind all three*, there's no easy way for an outside team of a few motivated people to have a real impact on the ecosystem by forking. And so here we are.

(*Red Hat itself is the one entity that could "fork Fedora", both morally and practically, if it felt that restarting the project was for the best.)

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 6:36 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

Funding does not equal developers. About 1/3 of Fedora devs are funded by Red Hat.
RH pays for almost all the infrastructure, though.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 7:52 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

By funded you mean employees of Red Hat who bare Fedora title in their job descriptions right? Or is Red Hat donating money to certain community members?

Then there is the fact ( despite misleading mailinglist title ) that there exist no Fedora developers other than those that work or contribute in maintaining the project and associated infrastructure.

The seperation in the role of packager was created, to keep the two different dialogs ( policies vs maintainances ) about packages in the distribution seperated.

Every distribution are made up of ( more or less the same ) upstream components which is the place where the actual development takes place. Not downstream.

You can even extend this further, the only seperation between *nixes as in linux,bsd and solaris takes place in the core/baseos, the rest is more or less the same applications or application stack running on top of those core/baseOS stacks.

Then those upstream components are glued together with the base/coreOS for the relevant *nix, runtime policies are made and new distribution and associated religion is born.

Waisting tremendous time and energy in people own lifecycle for no apparent gain other than maintaining nothing more than collective eco.
Leading to this happy life fulfilling cheers and joys of various upstreams having to deal with this needless downstream distribution deviation mess...

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 1:20 UTC (Wed) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link] (1 responses)

> And as things are evolving ( everything is being pre-built upstream, flatpacks, docker images etc ) there is always becoming less and less incentive for end users even administrators who need to start clinching themselve to cloud solution to make a name for themselves in related communities ( they participate in ansible galaxy not ansible in Fedora right ) to partake in downstream distributions.

We're coming at this from opposite sides, but I agree with you that the current implementation of Fedora Project is not working. "Red Hat Linux" was a wonderful thing, and opening "Red Hat Linux" up to community involvement with a derivative functioning as the funding for it all seemed reasonable enough ($34B of reasons, really). But whatever the Fedora Project has been trying to be distinct from that has failed.

> What once was a birth mark has grown into a tumor because the balance between Red Hat's involvement and the community has been tipped too much in favour towards Red Hat, something I warned Denise about would happen if she would throw more Red Hatters at the problem as opposide to say no you have find ways to make due with what you have, get the community rise to the occation when Red Hatters came running to mommy begging for more resources.

There are people that really want *Fedora* (the Desktop distro) to succeed in the distro wars. I don't. I couldn't care less about *Fedora*... I haven't used it for anything meaningful since Core 5. I care a great deal about RHEL and its derivatives, and Red Hat provides the process used to take Fedora and make a reliable, engineered, released product out of it. Fedora's missteps affect EL users.

I want what's best for the Red Hat ecosystem -- for basically any Linux distro that's RPM-based. If it takes throwing Red Hatters at the problems in the Fedora Project, so be it.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 23, 2019 7:00 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

Well failed from my perspective when Red Hat stop incorporated community innovation ( so to speak ) into RHEL and started to thrust it's internal coporate emphasis into the project and it's direction.

This needless fragmentation between linux distributions only exist on religious,philosophical level and the associated needless deviation that has seperated the distribution on component level as an result of that needs to be stopped ( on the core baseOS level atleast ).

Red Hats plays it's part in keeping that from happening by holding death grip on the /etc/sysconfig directory ( which should have been eliminated in Fedora by now ) , inconsistent naming in components between distributions, ( people can be as religious as they want which package manager is best or whether to use one and innovate in that area, just keep the package names consistent between distros ) etc.

With regards to epel, epel should have never existed in Fedora no more than modularity has any place in Fedora today, tomorrow, ever.

Both of these effords belong in distributions which are based on RHEL not Fedora which naturally puts it in CentOS these days, after Red Hat aquired it and it's community along with it.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 18, 2019 15:38 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (3 responses)

Measuring patterns in use is one way of better understanding what users want.

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 20, 2019 15:48 UTC (Sun) by archbtw (guest, #129959) [Link] (2 responses)

What about ring signatures as a form of tracking?

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 20, 2019 19:02 UTC (Sun) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (1 responses)

Can you elaborate? What would this get us over non-tracking counting?

Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking

Posted Jan 20, 2019 23:26 UTC (Sun) by archbtw (guest, #129959) [Link]

Sorry mattdm, I should have elaborated. With ring signatures, maybe more people would feel comfortable with providing more data than just a count, given that it is theoretically not traceable back to the owner.