Hi Werner,
On 08.11.21 12:24, Zeh, Werner wrote:
I fully can understand your point of view in this discussion. Unfortunately, we do live in a real world with real companies that are business-driven. With this sidenote in context the world changes dramatically in this regard.
Your request for an early discussion whether this or that decision is acceptable pretends that a silicon vendor is willing to start this discussion fully open at a time where he by himself is not yet clear how the feature in question will finally look like (because once the vendor exactly know how it will look like it is set in stone [or silicon] already). Given this, communication on topics like this is very restricted, even inside a company. Everybody of us has experienced already that teams inside of a big company working on the same project but just on a different facet of it are often not aware of what is going on at the neighbors. Why is that? Well, this is IMHO because in our world more and more work is spread among viewer people. I do not see that this is evil-driven, it is just the lack of time the individuals have to get their job done in a fixed "24-hour-per-day-world". So I guess even if the companies would be willing to follow your approach to discuss things early we still will not get a perfect world. And discussing things implies that it will take some time to get to a consensus. Time, that (I must say unfortunately) is not there anymore since every one wants to have the latest and greatest toy to play with at best already yesterday.
well, it's not true for the PSE. It may be true in other cases, hence I agree with you. And that's why my proposal was to have "predefined" questions so there is no need to have a discussion before the work on Gerrit can continue. The answers could certainly ignite a discussion, but that shouldn't stall anything.
You see how fast this discussion takes us away from technical stuff we all love to do and leads us into spheres where other factors rule the world. Again, I do see your point and deep inside me I full agree with you. I just do not see it happening in the current scenario we have around.
Sorry, it seems you misunderstood my proposal. In any case, please help to find a better solution if you think mine doesn't work.
Let's get back to your approach:
set of predefined, blob related questions (to be discussed) should be answered.
Let's take it literally as you want. What if the answer to the question "Would the blob ever be open sourced?" is "No!"? What would be the next action in your scenario triggered by this answer?
Merge the answers into our repo. I think it's valuable to have them under Documentation/.
As Martin pointed out already, to me it sounds like "To many blobs with no open source in sight and we will reject this platform", too. But I might be wrong here simply because I internally answered the question above for me without it being answered by your approach directly. So, to be able to judge properly on the approach I miss the targeted outcome of your approach (I know that it is just a proposal to start the discussion, I just want to make my thoughts clear here). Because I don't believe that having a set of questions answered honestly by the poor guy, who currently is in charge of bringing in this particular new interface for the blob or the blob itself, will lead to a more open policy at a given vendor.
I don't think that it will change anything at a vendor either. And that was never the point. I want to make working together at coreboot.org better.
In this regard, nothing needs to change at the vendor (would help a lot of course but it's not a hard requirement). The problems that led to stalling the PSE patch for instance are all on our side. We did not talk about it early enough, so now nobody knows what exactly is going on and whom to trust. That mentioned MMU for instance that would mitigate the concerns brought up in the leadership meeting, AIUI. If we'd have looked into that half a year ago, we wouldn't have to wait for it now and do everything in a hurry.
And yet again, answering this kind of questions is real work! Because the poor guy mentioned above now have to have meetings with various internal actors, describe the situation to them and hope that they will be able to provide the answers. In most cases, I guess, he can repeat the asking and explaining on the next linked person a few times. I am not sure if that guy will ever get the time for this relay run, especially if the outcome is not clear or guaranteed.
That depends on the set of questions and expected answers. We haven't even started to discuss them ;)
For instance, when asked if a silicon vendor would like to work with the coreboot community on a different solution. If the answer is not a clear "no", it could just be "not right now". Nobody said anything yet about the expected quality of the answers.
So yes, we need to stay in a close conversation with the vendors and keep them in a short loop. I am just not sure if we as coreboot alone can get that managed due to the lack of a business-model the vendor would be interested in.
Are you just repeating what people told you? I've heard that a lot. And also heard the opposite. Intel for instance clearly wants things upstream for their own profit. They know it's valuable.
On the other hand I feel sorry for the poor guy mentioned here. Just because we are so upset with a particular vendor (due to the past issues we all may have experienced) we should behave correct when it comes to treatment of individual contributors, especially when those are quite new to the community. So instead of barking around on Gerrit and blocking stuff from being developed let us be constructive and provide helping hands and guides on Gerrit and on IRC. If I were the guy in question and I would be welcomed in the community the like, for sure I would feel sad.
Right. That's what we need to change.
Nico