191–200 of 277 posts
This is going to become a more common theme. Geopolitics spill into everyday life in all sorts of unexpected ways.
This issue doesn't have anything to do with geopolitics.
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…
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…
what you guys are doing is really KPI grabbing.Hi Leizhen, and guys in the mail list, Recently I find one patch removing a debug OOM error message from btrfs selftest. It's nothing special, some small cleanup work from some kernel newbie. But the mail address makes me cautious, "@huawei.com". The last time we got some similar patches from the same company, doing something harmless "cleanup". But those "fixes" are also useless. This makes me wonder, what is really…
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27630257.
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I agree, I've no idea why it would be at the top of HN. Maybe China-hate?
Hate is a strong word. Dismissing it as simply 'hate' is emotive language (and dishonest, I think) in that it tries to guide the reader to the conclusion that it is completely unreasonable. A more honest word to use would be 'mistrust'
I am not using it "dishonestly", and I think that the conclusion it guides people to is completely reasonable and accurate - we should dismiss the majority of opinions that take the form "yup, that's just like China" or "China is doing this shit again? what a surprise."
The behaviors of individual workers in a system where they're being incentivized improperly don't have anything to do with China's current geo-political actions, and I get tired of so many people acting like 'China' (or 'the GOP' or 'California') is a single coherent entity with self-consistent behavior at all scales.
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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.
I'd agree with this for 99% of the time. There's a small 1% of the time though...where sometimes people really need to be told to fuck off.
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=========== 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…
"Huawei claims to be owned entirely by its employees, but verifying this claim is a tricky proposition...However, comparing Huawei to other Chinese corporations reveals that Huawei’s ownership is highly unusual." .... "Using Chinese corporate data, we determined that Huawei’s ownership structure is very uncommon, particularly for a company of its size. Fewer than three hundredths of one percent (0.0249%) of active Chinese corporations in our dataset are owned by trade union committees, like Huawei."
"...We set out to answer this question using Sayari’s database of 55 million Chinese corporate entities... ...Of these 55 million Chinese corporate entities, approximately 38 million are active."
"...But ownership by a “labor union committee” (工会委员会), like the Huawei case, is very rare. We identified just 4,547 active Chinese corporate entities that list a labor union committee as a shareholder. This represents just 0.0249% of the active non-household enterprise companies in our dataset. Among companies operating in the technology sector, ownership by a labor union committee is even more rare. Only 794 active technology companies in our database—or 0.0201%—are owned directly by a labor union committee..."
"...Of these 794 companies, Sayari was able to identify the registered capital in Chinese Renminbi for 526. Of these, just three had registered capital greater than 1 billion RMB (approx. USD $148 million); Huawei has registered capital of more than 16 billion RMB. Chinese companies of this size usually are major state-owned enterprises, publicly-traded, or both. In other words, it is practically unheard of in China for a labor union committee to own a company of Huawei’s size, scope, and global reach..."
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> 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 w…
Discussion in Chinese online community zhihu if anyone is interested: https://www.zhihu.com/question/466111598/answer/1951896502
https://www.zhihu.com/question/466111598/answer/1953785089
Basically, they claim it's possible that it's not about KPI at all; but rather, Huawei has added some internal processes to try to raise code quality. But those processes, rather than focusing on things like algorithms, ends up mostly catching unimportant things like minor security issues in tests and code style issues in third-party code. So they suspect that these trivial patches are somebody internal to Huawei trying to satisfy their own internal processes by fixing upstream.
That would mean it's still about KPIs, just not those of the patch submitter.
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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.
On GPLv3 lots of calls for Linus to stop supporting GPLv2
"How do we get you to stop..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
And the list goes on and on. That said, his decisions seem to have worked out amazingly well. At some point I can imagine getting tired at having to repeatedly defend your views.