I don't know anything about the personalities involved, and, for all I know, the letter is quite justified; but "I think that I've done you a big favour by giving you 10 minutes of my time" seems to be one of those remarks to which there is [a canonical reply](http://modernarthur.com/blog/christwhatanasshole.html) (no pun intended).
Ted Tso wrote the majority of the filesystem in question, so he is pretty much the authority on the matter.
He was hired by Google, and his point is that if Ubuntu is going to make a distribution, they need to have the engineers available to solve it, instead of just bugging actual engineers over and over again, which I see is reasonable given they sell support.
To be fair, Ted was also involved in a public spit with the Ubuntu kernel team about a year ago regarding an ext4 bug that he tried to "not-a-bug" based on a strict reading of the standard. He ultimately lost the argument, and had to fix ext4. See:
Whether that has anything to do with this particular sniping incident, I obviously have no knowledge. But I think it's an important piece of context.
Edit: after reading the whole bug report, it's also important to point out that the issue at hand here is a real and still-unfixed but in ext4 that has been worked around for Lucid. Ted's appeal that no one from Fedora has complained seems a little shallow given that there's a 7-line shell script at the top of the bug to exercise it.
Really, this doesn't seem warranted here. I know the kernel team doesn't like Canonical. But I don't see what they did wrong here other than pick a different workaround than the one Ted suggested.
I dunno, as someone who does a lot of free support, the quote in context sounds blunt but not asshole-ish to me. (Especially if Canonical has a track record of trying to get free work out of him or other kernel developers.)
"I've already done Ubuntu a huge favor by spending ten minutes to do a quickie investigation. Ubuntu needs to learn that it can't rely on upstream developers to jump through flaming hoops on short notice before a LTS release deadline as a cost-saving mechanism to avoid hiring their own senior kernel engineers."
I knew who he was and still thought it was an asshole comment.
Though I was particularly put off by the bit at the bottom, where he says that even if Ubuntu does hire and train up people to work on upstream kernel or filesystem issues Google's deep pockets mean they will just poach them once they are trained up.
Hopefully at Google they'll actually work on the upstream Linux rather than the Android fork.
(Probably other things too, but I suspect they hired him more because of their infrastructure requirements than for Android)
And to be fair, he said "Red Hat or Google" will hire them. He was implying (saying, actually) that Canonical don't pay their engineers enough, not that Red Hat or Google pay exceptionally.
Asshole comment or not, if Canonical wants help they should pay for it. Ted's not obligated to continue work for free simply because he's done so much work for free in the past. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite.
I might fix my girlfriend's computer for free, but I make sure to bill everyone else.
Asking him to work for free, and asking him not to be an asshole are two very different things.
I assume you don't act like an asshole no matter who you are helping. I'd go further and assume that even when you turn down people asking for your help, and suggest they might want to hire someone instead, you're still not an asshole to them.
It's pretty hard to not to make "an asshole comment" when you're trying in one email to convince a company to change their way of doing business.
Anyone who has watched Canonical since Hardy Heron (also an LTS release) knows that the company has deep and systemic problems. I wouldn't be surprised if the tone of Ted's response is also a result of past history with them of the sort that's illustrated by this message.
I might go even further and say that if you're as serious a member of the Linux kernel development community as Ted is, you might be rather concerned about Canonical's practices and how they're likely turning off a lot of would be Linux users.
How on earth is Canonical turning off would-be Linux users? They've finally made a distro that has a reputation (deserved or not) for being usable by the common man. How is that anything but good? You think Linux would greatly benefit from being more of a geek ghetto than it already is?
It's not good when they then release broken distributions or upgrades that break stuff that was previously working.
Going back to Hardy Heron, if you were using a machine with a Broadcom 43xx wireless card, you would have been rather upset for that to have stopped working. Or for HH to frequently crash without saying anything (even Windows gives you a BSOD).
What I'm saying is that while the objective is obviously good, the execution appears to be so bad than in combination with that objective it may well be a disaster.
What are these deep and systemic problems everyone keeps talking about? I've seen them mentioned in this thread a couple of times now, yet no one actually mentions what those problems are. I'm curious.
If what Ted is saying is true about them not paying anyone (who's good) enough to retain them nor hiring a few serious kernel hackers, then that pretty much makes the case, wouldn't you say?
I.e. given that they take a snapshot of Debian unstable and then furiously try to make it work in 6 months.
Another bad and telling sign is that ship dates are more important than quality, and that will also lose them good people. I would not want Canonical on my resume for very long after 6 months before the release of Hardy Heron and I have found such work places to be utterly depressing and demotivating.
