It sounds like the "breakdown in communication" amounts to the LVFS maintainer not being informed, as everyone is naturally obliged to do so(!), that System76 were adopting a different strategy, and according to this reply due to a simple matter of commercial priority. Maintainer continues by indicating they do not require an apology, after all, everyone is obliged to inform them of all matters firmware!

I didn't like the attitude in the original post, and I can understand why there is a little spice in System76's reply. Recommending a competing laptop brand over an issue as trivial as an alternative BIOS update mechanism that doesn't match Microsoft's compliance requirements seems like seriously sour grapes.

It seems they expect System76 to invent an in-house firmware update system that does not use the official mechanism supplied by their chipset's support package, and somehow this is automatically a better outcome than what existed already.

Maintainer should be reminded that toiling for free (presumably) on an important subsystem grants no special rights or entitlements, and lashing out at a vendor because they didn't toe an ideal line looks very immature

edit: sadly maintainer isn't even working for free, they're a Red Hat employee

To be clear, I wasn't making a comment on the tone of the original author. I tend to agree with you about the tone, but that person is not a company and is therefore held to slightly different standards. As far as the Microsoft thing, my read of that was that it was a vehicle for saying "everyone else already does this, it's the norm and expectation of consumers, don't be weird and proprietary" rather than wanting to bring in anything about Windows or whatever, especially since the article was talking about Linux distros. I have no ponies in this race, but I found System76's response very poor.

For what it's worth, that was my personal response and not anything official or reviewed by System76 "the company." I try to retain a bit of autonomy while working for Sytem76.

I agree that my tone may have been a little unprofessional itself, and that's on me. It has just been a frustrating time trying to do what's best for both our customers and the Linux ecosystem at large, and then being raked across the coals for it with a misleading and seemingly emotional blog post from a core Red Hat desktop employee and high-profile GNOME contributor. It's just not a fun thing to wake up to when you're also actively working with the guy on his other projects and contributing to GNOME itself, you know?

We all get frustrated, I get it. I've found a good rule of thumb for those types of situations is thinking about how the post would look if you said "I work at $COMPANY and directly represent them". Even if you don't include that copy in your posts (which larger companies enforce, see the typical "I work at X" disclaimers all over HN), it helps frame how your post may be interpreted.