Summary: Marcia Wilbur wrote about her experiences and views on the RHEL situation (availability of source code curtailed based on false pretenses)

Preface by Roy

THE other day Marcia sent me an informal message about Red Hat. It can be found below. Marcia's experiences perfectly echo what Ryan recently wrote about in relation to Red Hat and Fedora. Basically, to paraphrase what he noted, when some package becomes unmaintained or barely maintained Fedora basically dumps it. It doesn't try to step in and fix things. In that sense, Red Hat is a bit of a parasite on the Free software community, not vice versa. Red Hat wants slave labour volunteers while it cashes in billions of dollars. Ryan has been banned for technical criticism. Apparently volunteers only exist to work, not to express an opinion. Less than a day ago he also mentioned that Fedora was giving up on the well-maintained LibreOffice for no good reason. In some cases Red Hat would even lie or FUD a piece of software, e.g. SeaMonkey, so as to justify packaging it no more.

Marcia wants to write more about her experiences, both as a packager and hacker. She disputes the phony narrative from Red Hat. Here is her message.

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HI, my name is Marcia and I am a hobbyist hacker.

I got a new Screamin' laptop. Republic of gamers, NVIDIA. That other thing was crashing every hour on the hour. I couldn’t do much.

I saw Jeff Geerling's article or blog - fork, yeah.

Red Hat said that building code is a real threat to Open Source companies.

I could do some training videos, like how to simply build code, without adding value.

Oh wait, that’s *buntu, right?

Did I tell you what I found when I was working on Kids in Computers and just the shock of it all? It wasn’t that a *buntu was just taking care of how you eat packages and rolling it out as Edubuntu packages. It was the way people thought the world of this. But all they did was gather the flowers and put them in the bag.

I’m not sure if this is what Red Hat is talking about, but I wouldn’t mind talking about it. Because when one of the packages was abandoned or deprecated or unsupported, Ubuntu would would just remove it from theirs, which to me, is indicative of not supporting the community whose packages you’re using. They never went in and said, "oh well, we kinda need this, so how about we help you keep it and do development? Nope, I saw none of that because by that time Ubuntu -- well, at least it seemed like by the time Ubuntu realized the package was no longer supported -- it was already way too late.

Of course that’s just a hobbyist hacker's view of it. I’m sure the marketing department at the company has a different perspective.

Development contributions for a project you’re using for your company and for monetary purposes is considered good manners at the very least and very appreciated at the most. It makes sense because it helps your company keep using the product and it helps the Open Source project stay afloat.

I’d like to be a part of helping hobbyists and hackers everywhere!

From Jeff's post:

But when I read the following line in Red Hat's blog post:

Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity.

Nvidia - do you think anyone would be interested in that short video?

A guy came into my shop for an installfest way back in late November. He said,, "look Nvidia works on windows" and I go: “you’re not leaving until we get that working on Linux.”

Then, I locked the shop doors.

Challenge accepted!

I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t think it was possible.

“I’m just joking, but, we can stay here as long as you want and DoorDash delivers.” I really thought I was in for one of his long haul driver hacks. I was like. “if we can find even one person who has done it, then we can do it too”. I learned that in Freenode IRC. We didn’t have hardware compatibility lists for supported hardware. But we did have xFree86 config.

So he showed me that there were these driver apps for Nvidia right and I thought it was like the config file but I didn’t know. I was working on One Laptop Per Child units a couple years ago. I’m not in a position to pay coin for Nvidia on a laptop.

I never have seen Nvidia drivers like this on Linux laptops before. And apparently there’s the configuration app and then they had the update app. I have seen this before where they have one configure app and one update app.

Who does that? If you don’t want to update it and you want to configure it why do you need to apps for that? I’m thinking someone was milking for the money, right? Yeah I’m gonna need another team. 😂

We just had to run update. So I haven’t tried it on this Nvidia laptop yet. Maybe I’m behind the times because of my lack of updated hardware but at least I can use a shell and write something now without the thing crashing every hour on the hour.

Anyway, I’d like to write something about that Hobbyist/Hacker "real threat to Open Source" comment that Red Hat made. I've got to get that out of my system. ⬆