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“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

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Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#181

Post by Tainnor »

TimWolla wrote: post #168
Tainnor wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. While the kernel developers can obviously do whatever they want in terms of in-house jokes, the claim that "this is just normal usage, Google it" is a bit ridiculous. They could have just said, "we know it's wrong, we just thought it's funny". ("Borken" is a city in Germany, that's my only association with it )

> ("Borken" is a city in Germany, that's my only association with it ) Being German myself it's also the plural of "Borke" (i.e. the "bark" of a tree): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borke

I can't remember every saying or reading / hearing anything that involved a multitude of barks though, hence why, having lived in NRW, that association is still more prominent in my mind.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#182

Post by markus_zhang »

belter wrote: post #167
belter wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment is not racist because if you did read it the concern was NOT about the maintainer being Chinese and I made that VERY CLEAR. The concern was that in the Chinese group discussion commentators were mentioning he was Chinese. Now why would that be relevant indeed ? It can be relevant because it open the possibility to him being pressured by a company that is partly owned by the Chinese Army. That is where the…

Who Owns Huawei ? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3372669 Who Owns Huawei? The Company Tried to Explain. It Got Complicated. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/technology/who-owns-huawe...

The majority of the stock is held within 华为投资控股有限公司工会委员会. Of course one would be naive to believe that the _power_ is held within the same instituition too.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#183

Post by dyingkneepad »

Tainnor wrote: post #166
TimWolla wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they tried to fix "borken" to "broken" and the maintainer was not happy […] this does come down to not being familiar with this particular bit of slang - but they push back and argue a bit which doesn't help I did not know "borken" either, but I am aware of "borked" and "broken". Based on that email thread someone else already attempted to fix this in the past. Maybe it's an indication that the so-called "joke" is…

Agreed. While the kernel developers can obviously do whatever they want in terms of in-house jokes, the claim that "this is just normal usage, Google it" is a bit ridiculous. They could have just said, "we know it's wrong, we just thought it's funny". ("Borken" is a city in Germany, that's my only association with it )

They could also say "this is just a trap to waste the time of people who want to increase their Kernel commit counts. try again".

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#184

Post by _wldu »

otikik wrote: post #138
wyager wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why ousting Linus puts the long-term health of the kernel at risk. It’s very difficult and expensive, at a personal and professional level, to tell colleagues to “fuck off” if they are submitting low quality garbage for reasons related to their salary. Linux was Linus’s baby, he had nearly absolute control, and he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off…

I think the email was completely effective in denouncing a behavior. Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). Linux health happened *despite* Linus' manners, not because of them.

You can tell people to "go away" politely (yet firmly). It is an art, but it can be done without vulgarity.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#185

Post by lmilcin »

embeddTrway690 wrote: post #176
otikik wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the email was completely effective in denouncing a behavior. Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). Linux health happened *despite* Linus' manners, not because of them.

> Linux health happened despite Linus' manners, not because of them. I don't care. Telling incompetent people to fuck off is cool AF.

It may feel cool and that's probably all those bosses that keep threatening to fire their employees think, too.

It works for Linus because of special circumstances that are not easily replicated.

First, Linus is the creator of the project. He is also competent AF (borrowed your jargon here).

Second, people understand Linus is doing this solely out of care for the project. If you look at history of his outbursts you will notice a pattern.

Third, Linus tends to be right.

Fourth, Linus has and had since almost very beginning celebrity status and people tend to approve of eccentric behavior of celebrities more.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#186

Post by yorwba »

belter wrote: post #165
Aperocky wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post are downvoted because it is borderline racist. The maintainer happened to be Chinese and that gave you 'chills'. There are 1.4 billion Chinese and most of them live in China, there are also open source projects hosted in China, and a lot of open source contribution coming from people living in China, if only because there are many people there. The media links you posted are also made of conjecture ('Trump…

The comment is not racist because if you did read it the concern was NOT about the maintainer being Chinese and I made that VERY CLEAR. The concern was that in the Chinese group discussion commentators were mentioning he was Chinese. Now why would that be relevant indeed ? It can be relevant because it open the possibility to him being pressured by a company that is partly owned by the Chinese Army. That is where the…

> commentators were mentioning he was Chinese. Now why would that be relevant indeed ?

Because the maintainer could've been a foreigner who sees a "huawei.org" email address and imagines that they might want to apply unpleasant pressure to get their typo fixes merged.

Having a Chinese name makes it a bit less likely that the maintainer is influenced by such stereotypes and makes the critique of Huawei harder to dismiss out of hand.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#187

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

belter wrote: post #178
belter wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment is not racist because if you did read it the concern was NOT about the maintainer being Chinese and I made that VERY CLEAR. The concern was that in the Chinese group discussion commentators were mentioning he was Chinese. Now why would that be relevant indeed ? It can be relevant because it open the possibility to him being pressured by a company that is partly owned by the Chinese Army. That is where the…

=========== DiogenesKynikos 7 minutes ago [–] This is a detailed refutation of that paper: https://pekingnology.substack.com/p/who-really-owns-huawei-a ... It goes into the specifics of the Chinese laws governing employee share ownership, and why the employee shares are held by the union (it has to do with arcana of 1990s-era Chinese laws governing stock distribution by non-publicly-traded companies). Balding & Clark…

The article that I linked goes into great detail about what the legal relationship between the employees and the union committee is, what level of control the union committee actually has over the shares, what happens if the company dissolves, and so on. Just saying that the union is a member of the national federation, and that the company is therefore owned by the Communist Party, is grossly inaccurate.

The bottom line is that the union committee acts as a legal vehicle that allows more than 100 employees to hold shares, and that it can't just do whatever it likes with the shares, because of its legal responsibilities to the employees. This structure was used because decades ago, it was not possible (or at least legally tricky) for large private companies in China to issue shares to their employees.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#188

Post by ori_b »

newsclues wrote: post #78
lmilcin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, so either accept the status quo or create positive change. 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.

Sometimes, throwing trash into the trash bin is positive change. You don't need to put new trash in as a replacement.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#190

Post by protomyth »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #126
lmilcin wrote: post #38

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…

It's like the days when outsourcing software development to india was new, and they charged for number of lines of code written.

IBM apparently went that way too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0
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