Re: [net-next PATCH 00/15] eth: fbnic: Add network driver for Meta Platforms Host Network Interface

Jakub Kicinski
2024-04-04T20:25:49Z

On Thu, 4 Apr 2024 12:22:02 -0700 Alexander Duyck wrote:
> The argument itself doesn't really hold water. The fact is the Meta
> data centers are not an insignificant consumer of Linux,

customer or beneficiary ?

> so it isn't as if the driver isn't going to be used. This implies
> some lack of good faith from Meta.

"Good faith" is not a sufficient foundation for a community consisting
of volunteers, and commercial entities (with the xz debacle maybe even
less today than it was a month ago). As a maintainer I really don't want
to be in position of judging the "good faith" of corporate actors.

> I don't understand that as we are
> contributing across multiple areas in the kernel including networking
> and ebpf. Is Meta expected to start pulling time from our upstream
> maintainers to have them update out-of-tree kernel modules since the
> community isn't willing to let us maintain it in the kernel? Is the
> message that the kernel is expected to get value from Meta, but that
> value is not meant to be reciprocated? Would you really rather have
> us start maintaining our own internal kernel with our own
> "proprietary goodness", and ask other NIC vendors to have to maintain
> their drivers against yet another kernel if they want to be used in
> our data centers?

Please allow the community to make rational choices in the interest of
the project and more importantly the interest of its broader user base.

Google would also claim "good faith" -- undoubtedly is supports
the kernel, and lets some of its best engineers contribute.
Did that make them stop trying to build Fuchsia? The "good faith" of
companies operates with the limits of margin of error of they consider
rational and beneficial.

I don't want to put my thumb on the scale (yet?), but (with my
maintainer hat on) please don't use the "Meta is good" argument, because
someone will send a similar driver from a less involved company later on
and we'll be accused of playing favorites :( Plus companies can change
their approach to open source from "inclusive" to "extractive"
(to borrow the economic terminology) rather quickly.