On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 7:03 AM Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 6:52 AM Nicolas Mailhot via devel
<devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> Le mercredi 01 avril 2020 à 11:30 +0100, Leigh Griffin a écrit :
> >
> > To distill it down:
> >
> > - Gitlab has more features that are needed right now for our
> > stakeholder group
> > - Gitlab has an entire company dedicated to roadmap features, we do
> > not.
>
> Unfortunately, Gitlab’s roadmap is also conflicting with Fedora
> objectives. The bread and butter of Gitlab is intermediating between
> devs and end users, culling free software intermediaries like
> distributions, and positionning itself in their stead. That is unlikely
> to result in any commitment to making distribution workflows work.
>
> That would not be a problem if the disintermediation worked, but like
> many actors Gitlab sees the $$$ and power in being the
> desintermediator, and does not care if the result is deffective, as
> long as $$$ and power flows its way.
>
It's also important to note that at the core of GitLab's incentive
model is that they want to remove incentives to use FOSS solutions in
favor of their unified proprietary solution. They are constantly
integrating features and capabilities into the proprietary parts to
make it "juicier" for enterprises who don't really have a compunction
about whether they are using Free Software solutions or not, or even
may not be willing to support them if it was Free Software because of
outmoded thinking.
The consequence of this is that it starves interest and development in
FOSS solutions, and contributes to making the FOSS ecosystem weaker
over time.
That statement rings hollow for me, when Github is arguably the single
biggest vendor of open source in the world, no part of itself is open
source, and thanks to its pervasiveness, open source has won the war
of how development should work.
It wouldn't surprise me if not many people at Red Hat sat down
and
thought seriously about that particular consequence, because it's not
exactly an obvious one.
I don't know how many people do, since it's a growing company. I
assure you some of us do. :-)
> At heart, Fedora is a tooling project. It’s a collective of
people that
> chose to use a specific integration toolchain. Anything involved in
> creating Fedora packages cuts deep into the project core. (unlike, say,
> calendaring).
>
> It’s easy to forget this when making tooling decisions,
> because it is so pervasive, most do not see it anymore. Tooling is
> anything but accessory to the project.
>
Exactly. This is a huge part of why people are so upset over this,
because if you take away our tools, you take away the reason to be
passionate about Fedora. And thus, you remove why people use and
contribute to Fedora in the first place.
My reason for being passionate about Fedora is mainly about helping
people use the software and content we provide in ways that serve
their needs and solve their problems. To do that, I use Inkscape[1],
Wordpress[2], and Ansible[3] a lot.
[1]
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
[2]
https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop
[3]
https://github.com/ansible/ansible
--
Paul