[CentOS] OT: ?? Centos Still Broken, Red Hat won't fix ??

Whit Blauvelt whit at transpect.com
Fri Jul 9 00:16:05 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 06:35:47PM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

> It has been stated many times and on many fora that Red Hat's bugzilla is 
> not a mechanism for support.  They are under no obligation to address 
> issues raised there.  Is it nice when they do?  Absolutely. 

There are two issues you're conflating here. The first, paramount one is: Is
Red Hat taking responsibility for bugs people have taken the effort to
accurately report to them? This is a measure of any software project,
totally separate from the issue of whether and for what the project leads
provide paid support. In particular, if they are marketing this software to
anyone - even if the person kind enough to report the bug is not a paying
customer - they have a responsibility _to their paying customers_ to resolve
all serious bugs in a timely manner - or at least to indicate in their
bugzilla why they are rejecting fixing them.

This is an implicit contract that runs across all open source software
projects. We can't pretend that Red Hat is ignorant of it. If they're
chosing to ignore it this a violation of our community's ethics. Not that
the rest of us are Boy Scouts either. Still it's worthy of discussion and
complaint - the tribute vice owes to virtue and all that.

Besides, the poster here is making a serious point about Red Hat losing
sales. Smart companies pay attention to that sort of detail. It's not being
unkind to point out to them when they're missing out on a profit
opportunity. They owe it not just to their customers, but to their
shareholders, to stay awake on that.

Best,
Whit



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