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Discussion in Chinese online community zhihu if anyone is interested: https://www.zhihu.com/question/466111598/answer/1951896502
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Key Performance Indicator: ie, someone at huawei’s job performance review depends on “made N open source contributions to major projects”, and Goodhart’s Law strikes again.
Came to the comments to learn what KPI was. And leaned about Goodharts law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
I have worked in team with some kernel developers at Samsung, years ago, so let me put some perspective for those who do not understand the dynamics. In some companies, the amount of patents or Linux kernel patches you get accepted is direct measure of your success. As you know, whatever you measure becomes a target -- these guys feel very pressed to get ANY kernel commits accepted, no matter how small, irrelevant or…
Maintainers need their own metrics that are effective, and publish them and work to have partners use them.
But mostly, maintainers want to just focus on their work and not be bothered by corporations and their developers trying to game the system just to prop up their position.
The tone of the email reminds me a lot of Linus Torvald’s brutal code review comments in the google group back then. Can it be said that the “no nonsense” behavior often exhibited by maintainers of Linux kernel could be one of the reason the project grew to become what it is today
But that could be good or bad depending on whether you think Linux has lived up to its potential or not.
Open Source is such a surprisingly high trust ecosystem. I really hope that isn't something that has to be changed in the future. I can 100% understand the concern here. Possibly there is some sort of internal corporate metric or just personal bragging rights get tied to these kinds of patches. It costs the company nothing to incentivize this and the maintainers get all the work associated with it. Like all metrics "…
https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/
It's good for PR.
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Maintainers need their own metrics that are effective, and publish them and work to have partners use them.
The issue is that creating objective measure of contribution value is just unfeasible if at all possible. Not to mention amount of work required which is exactly the issue. But mostly, maintainers want to just focus on their work and not be bothered by corporations and their developers trying to game the system just to prop up their position.
Given that it’s annoying enough that we have articles and comments on it, perhaps investing maintainers time into developing metrics that work for the maintainers isn’t a terrible idea.
> I'm not saying cleanup is not important, in fact we have routinely cleanups of typos/grammar for btrfs. (And I guess mostly caused by myself?)
> Please at least merge all those small fixes into a larger patchset, and with a good cover letter to explain the reason (and auto-tool to do the change if possible) for all the involved maintainers, so that all of us are on the same page.