[johnduhart]

The author took an article about somebody suggesting that having email be the only mechanism for contributing to the Linux kernel might be a barrier to entry for new developers, and construed it into this piece on how the evil Micro$oft is looking to dismantle distributed git development.

From the original article:

> Picking her words carefully, she said work is being done towards “moving from a more text-based, email-based, or not even moving from, but having a text-based, email-based patch system that can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with."

That seems like an entirely fair statement to make for somebody who is on the board of The Linux Foundation.

[cxr]

The interesting thing to note is that the "way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years" refers to the way of working on GitHub, and that GitHub made it deliberately difficult to interoperate with other development models (like the kernel's, or old-style Bugzilla-and-patches) for business reasons. When you start out with trying to be a social network for developers, you'll happily take inspiration from the way Facebook divides the world into "Facebook" and "not Facebook", which naturally results in erecting barriers between your userbase and outsiders so long as those barriers can feed into your growth strategy of converting the outsiders into even more users.

Having said that, this blog post is foremost not actually a criticism of Microsoft/GitHub, but instead trying to draw attention to Sourcehut. Sourcehut is not a good example of how to solve GitHub's problems; if we were in a hypothetical world where the choices were GitHub or Sourcehut, the skew would remain forever what it is today, and the lead developer doesn't seem capable of understanding why and fixing Sourcehut's flaws.

[sreevisakh]

I feel that the author is drawing attention to Sourcehut because there are no alternatives that use the workflow he is pitching. It's not as great as Github at the moment, but he is trying to show what it can be. He always comes off as incapable of fixing sourcehut's flaws because a lot of suggestions he gets are contradictory to the fundamental design he has in mind. Despite this, sourcehut is making steady improvements. Drew also puts up invaluable resources which helps people like me get into the email workflow. Sourcehut currently has a steep learning curve, after which you would immediately recognize the design as a safer bet in the long term.

[cnst]

> That seems like an entirely fair statement to make for somebody who is on the board of The Linux Foundation.

You have to follow the money.

Even the original article admits that she's on the board specifically from Microsoft. That means she's representing Microsoft's interests. Thus has to choose words carefully to not be discounted like a total shill from Microsoft.

To put it in other words: Microsoft pays her 200k+/year to represent their interests at Linux Foundation; Microsoft also pays Linux Foundation XXXk/year to have their representative at the Foundation. The title of the original The Register article is kind of sensational and incorrect, in that it portrays the speaker as having the allegiance to the Foundation, which doesn't appear to be the case on closer examination.