On 04/11/2017 04:50 AM, David Sommerseth wrote:
> On 10/04/17 23:49, O'Neal, Miles wrote:
>> There are days I sort of wonder whether the Linux development crews
>> haven't been infiltrated by people trying to drive us into the OSX or
>> Windows camps.
> 
> That is very unfair.  To my knowledge, there exists no "Linux product
> management department" which sets the path forward for how any Linux
> distribution should go.
> 
> A lot of the new stuff happens in many distributions before it hits the
> enterprise Linux distributions - such as SL.  For RHEL and SL that means
> Fedora.  For SUSE Linux that means openSUSE.  For Debian, that's a a bit
> different story, as they have their unstable branch and is not a company
> compared to Red Hat or SUSE.  And many of these package maintainers and
> developers in distributions works with a broad range of upstream
> communities and projects.
> 
> The result is that if someone feels something could be improved, they
> start doing that inside the relevant upstream project involved - or they
> create their own new upstream project.  *Then* the various upstream
> projects and later on Linux distros decides to include these
> improvements.  And then it hits the enterprise Linux distributions.
> 
> So claiming that "Linux development crews" are infiltrated to make Linux
> s**k is just so wrong on every level.  First of all there exists no
> "Linux development crew" at any level, the development work is
> completely distributed and decentralized.  This is the kind of silly
> remarks which actually pays no respect to all the efforts and good faith
> provided by many people in many places.  Claiming those people are
> infiltrators is just beyond any reasonable limits of fairness.
> 
> If you dislike something ... Grab developers responsible for your
> dissatisfaction in IRC, join the mailing lists, go to conferences where
> you can meet these persons face to face or otherwise reach out the
> proper people directly.  *That way* Linux can truly be improved, by
> users actually giving real feedback to the persons who can do something
> about it.  Too much for you?  Get a Red Hat subscription and "outsource"
> that work through the Red Hat support channels.
> 
> And I encourage all of you to pay attention to the devconf.cz conference
> (lots of videos with past presentations on youtube too).  That does have
> a lot of focus on Fedora and RHEL, which is most relevant for SL.  There
> probably exists many other conferences too, where the heading of the
> various projects included in Linux distributions is presented.  And *do*
> provide feedback to those giving talks, that way things may improve.
> But of course, it is up to the developers to decide if to change or not,
> based upon how many gives feedback pointing in the same direction.
> 
> Ranting about the direction of "Linux" on a distribution ML which
> basically just ships what RHEL ships is just completely missing the
> mark.  It is a complete misunderstanding of what kind of distribution
> Scientific Linux is.  And then giving a remark so general it carries no
> argument of _what_ is wrong *and* _how_ you see it could be fixed ...
> How can that improve things?
> 
> </rant>

Well said!