Community V. "Community

[Mario Vukelic]

On Thu, 2009-03-19 at 15:31 +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:
> Heh, guess why I put in my remark about paying for coding to be done in 
> my previous post?

I did not see such a remark, sorry:
On Thu, 2009-03-19 at 08:33 +0800, Christopher Chan wrote: 
----------------------
> More like he was ignored by the 'Community' while a member of the 
> 'Community' came up with something similar.
> After all, how could they let a user transform into a 'to be taken 
> seriously developer' who had zero developer background.
> 
> But hey, you could say he finally got the 'Community' to 'listen'.
> 
> Who wants to try next?
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> However, how are you going to argue that one in the case of Con who is a 
> user that contributed working code? He did it on his own 'pocket' and I 
> don't remember there being any complaints about his scheduler adversely 
> affecting 'server performance'. Otherwise, by your reasoning, CFS would 
> never had happened.

To my knowledge, CFS *was* the scheduler that was chosen over his, and
it was precisely for server performance.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/8059

> Amber got it right, there is Community and then there is 'Community'.

I believe you are improperly abridging a more complicated story.

For one, the kernel is complicated and it is a highly critical piece of
software. Becoming a kernel contributor needs to be earned and the bar
is extremely high. I'm not saying Con did not make the bar (I would not
be qualified to judge in the first place), but it's wrong to blame the
kernel devs for not welcoming each and every one right away.

I'm not saying that everything went exactly correct with Con (again, I'm
not qualified to judge), but the kernel is not only technically complex,
but also socially. To get stuff accepted as a regular, it needs to be
high quality, you need to prove that you know what you are doing, and
I'm sure you need to fit the social fabric in some way. That's just to
be expected.

I dispute your harsh words about the exclusion of mere users by an elite
group. If you read the link above you will see that it's not so simple.