• mogoh@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    20
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    Cool, now can China invest in fixing 1000 upstream bugs in Gnome, KDE, Wayland, Pipewire, LibreOffice, NextCloud, Firefox, and so on? Also, could they develop open source drives and firmware for all the hardware they are exporting? I am not sarcastic. I just wonder why all this big players that use Linux create an own Distribution, but beside from that, not doing much.

    • incici@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      It’s probably because those with decision making authority have no idea what open source is and how it works.

      That being said, China is a huge contributor to open source. For example Huawei and Alibaba are among top kernel contributors.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Hwawei has been called out for KPI farming on the Linux kernel (i.e. lots of bogus contributions to boost their support numbers): https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/18/153

        There’s some more insight on this Hackernews thread where an ex-Samsung employee defends Hwawei and notes it’s not intentionally KPI farming, but rather poor internal performance tools.

        I would gladly be proven wrong, but a quick Google search doesn’t discuss any concrete contributions Hwawei makes (only Git simple git diff metrics, which fall under the discussions linked above)

        • incici@lemmy.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          2 years ago

          Huawei is not the only one. Almost all software companies have some KPI that employees are farming. (speaking from experience here)

          • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlM
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            5
            ·
            2 years ago

            Big Tech companies probably do more KPI boosting than Huawei does, but Huawei is bad because China bad. It always comes down to this, because those racists can never be racist enough, and always play to the tune of whatever their favourite news channel or political party teaches them.

          • foxglove@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            2 years ago

            Your post on r/privatelife was about Hwawei trying to push a backdoor into the kernel (you’re right, I haven’t seen any concrete evidence of this), but this post is about KPI farming and cleanup commits. They seem like mutually exclusive scenarios to me.

            • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlM
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              2 years ago

              It is more related in terms of the accusatory intent than you think, if you recognise the timing of USA’s trade war escalation on Huawei (and the year long kidnapping of CFO) and the further escalation that was done by Trump and other North American racists regarding origin of COVID.