[janosdebugs]

For Red Hat, there are bugs and there are customer cases. The two are not the same, but they are linked internally. Customer cases don't deal with "X functionality doesn't work in libvirt", but rather a higher level issue that the customer can't resolve due to the underlying bug. Here a workaround the customer can live with is a perfectly acceptable solution.

In my time I was there I never saw a bug closed as WONTFIX unless the customer case was resolved in a satisfactory manner. Red Hat people are very aware who's paying the bills. I have seen badly managed escalations, but I've never seen anyone taking customer problems lightly. However, bugs that have no customer case attached to them carry very little weight unless an engineer, a PM, etc says that this is really bad and will cause problems in the future.

This is part of where the disconnect comes from. Red Hat prides itself in being an open source company, but it is first and foremost a customer-oriented company. Sure, often individual people will take time they have left and go fix something for the community, but if it's something more involved, it will need PM and management support. Benefiting from and also providing their customers with open source is simply part of the model that has worked for Red Hat, but nobody should be under the illusion that this is done for the greater good. Red Hat is a company and companies serve the purpose of making money for their shareholders. If this happens to align with the interests of the open source community, that's awesome, but will not always be the case. Over the past few years there have been numerous instances of that unfortunate reality.

Without knowing the specifics about libvirt's funding, if a project needs to be truly community-driven, the community must come up with a model that doesn't involve Red Hat paying a large portion of the salaries of the people involved, or it will be subject to Red Hat's business interests.