When it comes to contributions to open source software, the quantity of patches a company or individual adds clearly affects how important of a contributor the company appears to be. Contributors usually agree that they want to focus on the quality instead of quantity.
A Linux Kernel maintainer wrote a somewhat adversarial message directed at people associated with Huawei about numerous submissions they have made which are not very substantial. Basically, Huawei employees submitted many individual small changes— including insignificant spelling corrections or minor cleanup.
While one might argue that those are still useful changes, consider that Huawei could have put all of the single changes into one single merge request— but that would be only one commit as opposed to 5,000 or however many commits they hoped to make. 5000 sounds more impressive than 1. The writer of the message accused Huawei submitters of KPI-grabbing, or submitting many small things to make themselves look more productive. (KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. For the Huawei submitters, it might mean some internal performance metric related to how many commits they made to projects.)
Why would submitting in little bits matter to the kernel maintainer? Well, numerous small submissions such as those complained about create more work for the kernel maintainers without adding much to the project. Time is a resource, too.
There is also the aspect I started with at the beginning: By using numerous commits for minor things where one commit might do, a company can appear to be a much more important part of a project than the company actually is. If that is intentional, it is not a very good look.
Anyway, it did remind me of this article I saw earlier in the year about how Huawei is one of the top contributors to Linux Kernel 5.10 Development…
