Monday 14 August 2023

New responsibilities

As part of the same process outlined in Matthias Clasen's "LibreOffice packages" email, my management chain has made the decision to stop all upstream and downstream work on desktop Bluetooth, multimedia applications (namely totem, rhythmbox and sound-juicer) and libfprint/fprintd. The rest of my upstream and downstream work will be reassigned depending on Red Hat's own priorities (see below), as I am transferred to another team that deals with one of a list of Red Hat’s priority projects.

I'm very disappointed, because those particular projects were already starved for resources: I spent less than 10% of my work time on them in the past year, with other projects and responsibilities taking most of my time.

This means that, in the medium-term at least, all those GNOME projects will go without a maintainer, reviewer, or triager:
- gnome-bluetooth (including Settings panel and gnome-shell integration)
- totem, totem-pl-parser, gom
- libgnome-volume-control
- libgudev
- geocode-glib
- gvfs AFC backend

Those freedesktop projects will be archived until further notice:
- power-profiles-daemon
- switcheroo-control
- iio-sensor-proxy
- low-memory-monitor

I will not be available for reviewing libfprint/fprintd, upower, grilo/grilo-plugins, gnome-desktop thumbnailer sandboxing patches, or any work related to XDG specifications.

Kernel work, reviews and maintenance, including recent work on SteelSeries headset and Logitech devices kernel drivers, USB revoke for Flatpak Portal support, or core USB is suspended until further notice.

All my Fedora packages were orphaned about a month and a half ago, it's likely that there are still some that are orphaned, if there are takers. RHEL packages were unassigned about 3 weeks ago, they've been reassigned since then, so I cannot point to the new maintainer(s).

If you are a partner, or a customer, I would recommend that you get in touch with your Red Hat contacts to figure out what the plan is going forward for the projects you might be involved with.

If you are a colleague that will take on all or part of the 90% of the work that's not being stopped, or a community member that was relying on my work to further advance your own projects, get in touch, I'll do my best to accommodate your queries, time permitting.

I'll try to make sure to update this post, or create a new one if and when any of the above changes.

5 comments:

Sam Thursfield said...

Thanks for sharing - i think a lot of work coming out of Red Hat over the last decades has been largely "invisible", i.e. we rarely said as a community "Thanks to Red Hat for investing $X in the Bluetooth stack this year"; and only now as some of that support is disappearing we start to notice. :/

ANTANI said...

Is this the power of IBM?

Andy Holmes said...

Well said, Sam. Honestly, I could never figure out how you maintained so many projects in the first place hadess :)

For someone outside the management chain, it's difficult to guess exactly what this is about. Although, I wouldn't surprised if it were Red Hat responding to the negative PR they get, despite all the contributions they make.

Silent|Storm said...

Q: What do you get when a company merges with IBM?
A: IBM.

Intentionally left blank said...

This is critical and I can read the sorrow feelings between the lines. Is there a way the publicly interact with the bosses? Because I think they didn't considered the consequences for Desktop-Linux. And for Fedora and RHEL!

The projects gnome-blutooth, libgnome-volume-control, libgudev, geocode-glib, power-profiles-daemon form a foundation of necessary libraries for Desktop-Linux. If that stuff works users doesn't notice it much, if not users will be not happy with Linux at all.