So OSS Europe was an interesting experience, this year, in a way.

I did my usual talk, and started with the usual section on kernel releases. When talking about stable updates I tossed in a quick mention that six-year support from the stable team was being phased out — something I understood to be generally known for about the last year. Way at the end of the talk, as my last topic, I discussed at some length the stresses being felt by kernel maintainers.

@sjvn wrote an article about the talk (https://www.zdnet.com/article/long-term-support-for-linux-kernel-to-be-cut-as-maintainence-remains-under-strain/) and made a connection between the stable-policy change and the maintainer issue — something I had not done in the talk. It was a bit of a shift from what I said, but not a bad article overall.

Then the rest of the net filled up with other writers putting up articles that were clearly just cribbed from SJVN's piece — sometimes with credit, sometimes without. I'm getting emails about what a terrible idea this all is, as if I had anything to do with that decision or can somehow change it. I have, it seems, taken away everybody's six-year support, and they're not happy about it.

All because of a 30-second mention of a change that was made public something like a year ago. My 1.5 minutes of fame has given me a new appreciation for this old quote from Rusty Russell: "when a respected information source covers something where you have on-the-ground experience, the result is often to make you wonder how much fecal matter you've swallowed in areas outside your own expertise."

@corbet @sjvn Send the emails my way, no one seems to ever actually want to talk to _me_ about these support dates for some odd reason...

@corbet @sjvn

"people" seem to get the most violently angry if something free-to-them is stopping/ending, much more than if they were a paying customer for the same

@corbet In another unanticipated side effect, that's how I discover you around these parts. So thanks to both you and @sjvn, hello, long time no see, hope you're doing well!

@gregkh @sjvn @corbet Everybody is (still) afraid of Greg The Giant? ;-)
And I'm afraid no CoC can change your physical size...

@gregkh @corbet @sjvn I guess we should start making full, regular press releases, so journalists will not wake up surprised half a year later after the decision is made public.

@krzk @corbet @sjvn press releases will never be read by the people that actually need to know this anyway, so we aren't going to go down that path :)

@corbet @sjvn

"""[…] how much fecal matter you've swallowed in areas outside your own expertise."""

We'd all go crazy if the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect wouldn't exist:
https://loricism.fandom.com/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect

"""[…] describes the phenomenon of an expert believing news articles on topics outside of their field of expertise even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the expert's field of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.""" 😬 🥴 🙃

@corbet There's public news and then there's Public News. If there's rhyme or reason to it, I haven't seen it and I do this for a living.

As for story copying at least people were writing, albeit cribbing from my work. As we talked about briefly yesterday, my stories are copied lock, stock, and barrel at least a dozen times a tale. Sometimes the copies, without my name on them of course, show up higher on Google searches than my originials.

@gregkh @corbet The ones I've seen crying are from people running CentOS 7 and, RHEL 5. They've got bigger worries than the kernel.

@corbet
The phenomenon described by Rusty Russell is also called #GellManAmnesia: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

@sjvn