On Sunday, May 23, 2021 7:31 AM, Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
You are conflating completely different things.
First, IBM isn't involved in anything around CentOS Stream. Red Hat has been very consistent about this. Many Red Hatters have confirmed this over and over. If they were lying, they would be in considerable trouble for making such statements publicly.
I never said they are lying. It has been stated by Red Hat employees on this mailing list that Red Hat now has a special partnership with IBM. That should include having the contacts to speak on behalf of the CentOS project.
Second, IBM hasn't owned the OpenAFS project for many years. It was spun off in 2013 to the OpenAFS Foundation[1]. Additionally, the OpenAFS Foundation would need to gather approvals from the OpenAFS contributors themselves to relicense the code, since there's no CLA requirement to contribute. You are barking up the wrong tree to change the license of OpenAFS.
IBM hasn't been involved in the governance for many years. That is different than assigning copyright control. If you look at the top of each OpenAFS source file, you can see IBM still asserts copyright and is the copyright owner.
You are correct that there has been no CLA, that each contributor would have to be contacted or their code rewritten. That is going to be a huge undertaking. But going through that process should start with the largest copyright holder which remains IBM.
Third, Red Hat operates as a separate company under the IBM conglomerate. That means completely separate HR, legal, sales, marketing, and engineering teams. IBM also famously requires companies under its ownership to coordinate with each other as if they weren't owned by IBM, so Red Hat and IBM Cloud teams have to directly negotiate for deals with no help from the parent anyway.
I over simplified and I can understand why you would be frustrated with me. RH should still have a close enough relationship with IBM at this point to provide better help than just "legal says NO."
I'm not asking RH to assist in getting Oracle to relicense ZFS. I perfectly understand they don't have friendly relationship with Oracle. I wouldn't consider it fair to expect RH to assist with that. It is not my intention to ever push for OpenZFS inclusion.
However, in this specific instance for this specific kernel module, I think it is fair to say RH has a friendly relationship with IBM.
I'm personally getting very tired of how you keep doing this on the list. You don't disclose anything about yourself and you continue to attempt (and in some instances, succeed) at gaslighting the CentOS community. You're stoking the flames and I'm increasingly suspicious that you're trying to make this fail. I would appreciate it if you started operating in good faith rather than whatever you're doing now.
My understanding of "gaslighting" is promoting something the author knows to be false.
My key concern has been the openness gap for the Stream 8 kernel. If it was up to me then my focus right now would be kpatch and testing applying increments starting from the CentOS 8.3 release 240 of the kernel.
However, here is the commit history on gitlab for the Stream 8 kernel:
https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-stream-8/-/commits...
It is *one* commit. There is no history of incremental changes.
So, was I "gaslighting" when I raised the concern that there is still an openness gap with Stream 8 and the Stream 8 kernel? Was I saying something I knew to be false?
Is gitlab presenting a series of individual commits for the Stream 8 kernel and proves I have presented a false concern?
I respect your feedback and your contributions. I am willing to accept that I have worded things poorly and need to reconsider how I word things in the future. But if you want to mischaracterize what I have said as "gaslighting" then there is nothing I can think of to do about that.
I'm also not sure what I can do about your claim that I am trying and in some cases had success in making Stream 8 fail. That is the exact opposite of what I want. I'm not astroturfing through other forums and have been instead presenting all my concerns specifically to this mailing list. If my reasoning is flawed then this audience should be the most qualified to know that. Any attacks through external forums on Stream that speak to a wider and less knowledgable audience is not performed by me.
If all it takes is one person pointing out flaws on the developer mailing list to cause failures then there is something else foundationally wrong. And again, causing failure is not my intention. I assume someone actually seeking to cause Stream 8 to fail would do a much better "job" at it.