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.
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.