| Circa 2002-2006 I was quite active in the Linux community I.e. I contributed some code to a few GNU projects and a couple of kernel patches to solve problems that were, quite selfish really. But hey it turns out it wasn't just me or my company so I thought I'd contribute them. They solved real problems to be honest (driver bugs and crashes). Having been on the end of a chunk of hate for about 40% of my work simply on political grounds rather than any technical grounds, I can understand this entirely and I have no problem with Lennart at all on this basis. I'm talking about patches, not reengineering either. The basic problem was raising a defect "X doesn't work properly, here's a tested fix that we deployed in production". The answer was ticket closed. I reopened, and asked for an explanation. Literally "get fucked, we don't want your 'fix'". I replied "I'll patch my own kernel and SRPMS then" followed by a massive lecture from one of the project leaders on how I should be communicating with the community and that I need to be part of the special circle jerk club on that project to get a patch in. The defects were even removed from the trackers if the community members were rude to the outsiders to hide the fact. So out of the goodness of my own heart I wasted 5 days with GDB debugging shit, wrote a patch that fixed it and raised a ticket with the patch attached, was closed, BANG. This happened 4 times on different projects. So yes I do find that a number of the higher profile projects are purely powered by liquid asshole. Unfortunately that makes me want to rely on the platforms less and has made me shift my focus to the Windows and BSD platforms which are surprisingly less political. Argh. I even hated writing this. |