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Comment by roflc0ptic | Hacker News Reader

He doesn't sound particularly aggrieved, and he's not telling people to boycott their products.

> I don’t actually mind if System76 doesn’t use fwupd and the LVFS, I just don’t want people to buy new hardware and be disappointed.

As someone uninvolved who occasionally looks at linux laptops, this is really useful information for me. One of the (apparently) core developers of (apparently) a tool that allows cross hardware compatibility for linux is saying "this laptop does not adequately support arbitrary versions of linux, and they don't have a compelling technical reason why".

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The post is not about spreading information, but attacking them for not using LVFS.

If what the author wanted to do was simply to spread information, the post would have been the length of a single Twitter post:

    Make note: System76 uses a custom fw update util only bundled with "Pop_OS!".

The entirety about this post is to hang System76 out for their process and decision, explaining how they are wrong, and how the author is willing to forgive them for this wrongdoing without the apology the author feels is in place. The post is nothing but emotional.

(I have no strong opinion about System76's decision, but I find this post format to be awful.)

Interesting that disinterested parties here are coming to such different conclusions.

If sharing the process issues was valueless, it would definitely seem personal. But it doesn't seem valueless for me. When making informed judgement about which companies to throw in with, their process matters.

It's like MongoDB from days of yore. There was someone who reported a bug and the mongo team were jerks about it. I've specifically chosen not to use Mongo because of that interaction. Don't want my projects hinging on dev teams with good marketing sense but poor communication skills. Don't want my hardware depending on vendors who can't make nice with the FOSS community.

It is interesting, although not that surprising. Human languages are awfully imprecise means of communication. :)

I agree that sharing process is important, and your MongoDB example is a good one (not that I am short on reason to not use MongoDB).

However, I don't find the post to describe System76 processes beyond "there was email communication", and that progress towards a goal aligning with the author's preferences was suspended. The only thing I can conclude from it is that the author is in disagreement with System76.

From the format of the post, I would quite frankly be biased towards assuming that the problem lies with the post author. This assumption is of course not based on tangible evidence, which would require access to the email exchange to obtain.

Obviously we only heard one side of the story here, but from personal experience I can sympathise with him.

You're trying to work with that company, help them to use your platform. There might already be some personal attachment here if you really believe in the platform you created and take personal pride in every OEM hopping on board, but even if he just believes in the "greater good" of having this unified experience on Linux I can see how he wants this to happen.

Then there is Apparently some capable person at system76 who reverse engineered the proprietary updater they had to use before, and this is where things start going wrong. This is the part I have experienced personally on both sides. The system76 guy gets a great ego trip out of his achievements, somehow management/marketing hears about it and together they brainstorm how they can build their own independent update infrastructure. Marketing sees their unique selling point, dev sees exciting new things to create, feels like internet super hero, tells lvfs how shitty their whole approach to this is since super-dev has so much more insight into how this should be done properly.

I definitely agree how an achievement can cloud judgement and lead to something akin to an ego-trip. We've all been there.

However, two inputs to this. One is that it appears that S76 had to work to do in order to become compatible with LVFS, and ended up just extending this to the point where they had an updater. Two, I can't possibly imagine anyone considering a custom firmware updater a selling point, especially not at the cost of not getting the free labor of having someone else maintain both tools and infrastructure.

I kinda suspect we were dealing with a "Hmm, we could just sprinkle a bit of UI on this and then move on to other tasks", knowing that it was suboptimal, but not finding the issue important for the time schedule.

When I cut corners as a programmer at work, it's usually due to time constraints, priorities or annoying customers, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of developers and managers alike...

Did he attempt to reach out to them via email to get a status update? It doesn't sound like it, he just went straight to whining on a blog.

He was given a notification by System76 back in January that we were busy with moving into the new warehouse, hardware testing, and developing our 18.04 release. Getting our firmware to work with his tool is not a high priority.

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