Unpopular opinion (Re: CTI - Making a decision for glibc.)

[Adhemerval Zanella Netto]

On 28/01/26 09:47, Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> So...
> 
> I'm coming from a Linux distribution that is entirely noncommercial and
> has in the past internally rejected the Linux Foundation as service provider,
> because, err, it seemed way too corporate to us. In addition, right now all
> my involvment with Gentoo and glibc is as an unpaid volunteer. That said...
> 
>> Basically this proposal is for setting up a directed fund controlled
>> by the Linux Foundation into which corporations can donate money if
>> they first become a LF member company. In exchange these companies
>> will get a board seat to control what happens to this money and may
>> appoint a technical advisary member....
> 
> I'm citing Mark here because this is a nice example, but my mail is
> directed not to him specifically, just to make this clear.
> 
> Please get a grip. We are for now talking here about who is hosting git,
> mailing lists, and bugzilla. Git and mailing lists are by definition
> decentral, bugzilla is an SQL database which can easily be dumped and
> restored elsewhere.
> 
> If anyone talks about project control and governance, it's *much* more
> important to look at who is doing the actual coding work. This does for a
> successful open source project not only include submitting your own fun
> patches but also keeping the entire project going by helping out with
> difficult things that are not your own passion.
> 
> As someone who is keeping track of the mailing list and patchwork,  I would
> guess that roughly 90% of contributed code in glibc these day comes from people
> who work for corporations with a stake in glibc. So, Gnu or not, complaining
> about the Linux Foundation is somewhat hypocritical then.
> 
> I've made my peace with this because I see the systemic reasons for it.
> 
> If you think that this situation is wrong somehow, the first thing you
> should do is join the patch reviewer pool [1] and volunteer help to
> regularly work down the submission queue in Patchwork.
> 
> Making a stand over where services are hosted is mostly just throwing
> flashbangs.
> 
> 
> [1] https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/PatchworkReviewMeetings
> 

Thank you Andreas, this is very reasonable take of this situation and I fully
agree with your assessment. I also don't see why we can't just rollback this
effort if the glibc community found out any governance or similar issue once
it is implemented.