The struggles of an open source maintainer

Re:The struggles of an open source maintainer by zapita on Friday May 17, 2019 @12:07PM (#19940879)

All these problems are very easy to solve. Suse and Red Hat could stop trying to have it both ways: either you get the flexibility of a fork, or you get the brand recognition of the upstream project. But you want both - the upstream brand to get users, and the downstream flexibility so that you can “differentiate” and sell support.

This problem is entirely created by distributions and their “packagers know best” philosophy.

You say downstream patching is necessary. Go ahead and strip the upstream trademark from every package which you patch downstream, replace it with new Suse-specific trademarks, and let’s see what users prefer!

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Re:The struggles of an open source maintainer by ecnahc515 on Saturday May 18, 2019 @02:24PM (#19948907)

This isn't a SUSE or Red Hat caused issue, it's a users thing. Users want it both ways. Users want the flexibility to assume a project is the same as the upstream (but maybe feature frozen at a specific version), while also wanting all the security and bugs to not exist. Users are paying to have it both ways, and whether or not it's feasible, the market for it exists, and Suse/Red Hat are just trying to fill the gap.

If it was entirely the vendors, then we would see significantly more adoption in fast moving OSes, but that's still not a very popular model for production servers, even in the age of the cloud, containers, etc.

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