How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution - eviltoast
Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control the debug session anymore. Multiple people have already investigated this problem and I had a good starting point, but we still weren’t sure in which software component the issue lied: it could have been the toolchain, the gdbserver, the Linux kernel or the custom patches we applied on top of the kernel tree. We were quite far away from finding the root cause.
  • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
    383·
    1 year ago

    I would absolutely try to sue in this case. My experiences with very experienced specialists is not stellar at all. The amount of gatekeeping and sheer arrogance is frightening. I get it, nobody wants to work on the kernel. It’s an underpaid (presumably) and underappreciated task. I would probably become an asshole as well if I dedicated 90% of my free time to fixing obscure bugs in even more obscure architecture.

    Disclaimer: I‘m not a kernel dev and my experience stems from interactions with maybe 100 people of varying stages of proficiency. Sadly, the more proficient, the less friendly they often were.

    Edit: the amount of downvotes you get for saying something unpopular without being violent or abusive is showing the lack of guts to discuss something in a civilized manner. Shame on you.

    • RonSijm@programming.dev
      201·
      1 year ago

      Edit: the amount of downvotes you get for saying something unpopular without being violent or abusive is showing the lack of guts to discuss something in a civilized manner. Shame on you.

      People aren’t discussing this because “try to sue in this case” is just an absurd concept - but okay.

      Who are you going to sue and for what? His concept of recognition is just “getting his code into the kernel”? He could have written a blog post in the context of “How I found a bug in the Kernel and helped fix it” - He did contribute, he did the QA part and the diagnosing part, thats contributing.

      But his post with the sentiment of “I did it all for nothing!” makes it seem like the goal was to get “recognition” and get his code into the repo… The goal is just to fix bugs, and he did contribute to that

      • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
        27·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for explaining. This helps me understand both his and this here situation.

        First of all, I‘m totally ok with it being absurd. It was my impression that this person has been wronged and should be appropriately compensated for their (shit ton of) work. From the text, it seemed like there is a way to get this compensation (in the form of recognition of some sort).

        I‘m totally fine with being told that he misrepresented the situation and he‘s more going off a principle here which would never be enforceable. If there were such a „standard“ for recognition for kernel controbution, one could definitely try to enforce it.

        In general, I have no problem with standing corrected. What I do have a problem with is the way people in IT centric communities on lemmy (and reddit) behave in general.

        Obviously you were kind enough to explain instead and without being violent or abusive. I highly respect that. Thanks again.