> A private thread ensued between myself, GNU, and Benno, and what came out of that conversation was that Benno was not going to be allowed to become a maintainer of the project in GNU’s eyes.
This is the part I'm most curious about. Why didn't GNU let him become a maintainer?
GNU maintainers already have full control over their projects. The only thing left to delegate to maintainers is the definition and application of the four software freedoms.
> The GNU Assembly is about treating the "GNU project" like an actual project.
With input from people who don't agree or would like clarifications? Because that didn't happen during the last time you tried this[1]. It was just the proposers talking in circles and ignoring input and questions, asserting that things would be for the better but unwilling to engage what "better" would entail.
> The GNU Assembly
is not GNU. And you were asked repeatedly to change the name to avoid confusion the last time you tried this with "gnu.tools", but it was ignored, just like all the input and questions that didn't straight up fit your world view.
> It is about collaborative governance and better communication
That's what got people to listen to you on the gnu-misc mailing list, but it turned out it was about ousting rms (without any solid plan other than "trust us") and shutting down dissenting opinions.
There's a reason you failed the first time, and it doesn't look like the gnu-tools initiative has managed to improve their governance or communication in the meantime.
> The odd part here to me is that it seems to be the norm that, if you want to join the maintainer team of Guile, you ask RMS and you don't even need to talk to the existing maintainer team first.
Well, this issue was much more complicated than that, wasn't it? In this case the role of RMS is more as that f an arbiter.
Apart from that, RMS is the leader of the GNU project. When I submitted my little project to GNU, I first talked to RMS (it was many years ago, o I don't remember the details, but I wrote to some general address and he answered). By submitting my project to GNU, I accepted his leadership, and it was a conscious decision, I knew very well what to expect. Actually, RMS seemed to me quite reasonable and down-to-earth about technical issues, even though I often disagree with him on philosophical issues.
In an ideal world, everyone collaborates harmoniously and no intervention is needed. In practice, clashes do happen sometimes, and under such circumstances the role of the leader is crucial in helping to find a reasonable solution.
> do you think that GNU will just fold when he’s no longer with us?
Either fold, have new leadership, or become a formal declaration of endorsing some values (not really a project). Maybe it will eventually center around one subproject and become mostly associated with it (Guix as THE GNU OS).
The problem is that the Guix maintainers want to remove Stallman from his own project while he is alive and active, and they pursue their intention with methods that are unethical, disrespectful and destructive to the community.
> Even RMS never suggested they leave the GNU Project (to my knowledge) <...> what makes you think it’s a good idea?
I don't really want Guix to leave GNU, I'm questioning the motivation of the maintainers.
Libreboot use to be part of the GNU project, but I'm not aware of any collaboration after the fact. I just know the primary author/maintainer of Libreboot had a falling out with the FSF and GNU project. I don't think they ever reconciled (and I'm not sure they will at this point).
As for the cause of their falling out, this happened around 2016 when the FSF let go of a transgender employee. It appears the original statements by the Libreboot maintainer was deleted off of their site, but they are archived[0][1] and the original email sent out declaring themselves no longer part of the GNU project[2]
Just to be clear, I am not sure if an actual reason was given out for why they were fired. The FSF had declined giving an actual reason, and Richard Stallman himself stated "The dismissal of the staff person was not because of her gender. Her gender now is the same as it was when we hired her. It was not an issue then, and it is not an issue now."[3]
Those articles and emails are the only primary sources that I'm aware of. There might be more information somewhere else, but unfortunately I don't really know of anything further.
There was more drama later on. Something about the author leaving the project and then forcibly taking it back a few years later down the line against other contributor's wishes. But I think the reason for that was a bit more nuanced and I didn't keep up with that. I'm not even sure it had anything to do with the FSF or GNU project anyways.
> Genuine question, what exactly do these maintainers want ? Stallman has already quit his leadership role/position, right ?
No. There was some confusion on this point because a note was posted to https://stallman.org/ announcing that RMS stepped down from leadership of GNU, but this turned out to not have been posted by RMS (or with his authorization).
(It was apparently posted by someone who added RMS as an entry to the "what's wrong with…" series, with a link to the Medium post that kicked all this off. Without commenting one way or the other on the underlying issue, that is a fairly funny bit of Internet vandalism)
> at this point I just see him as holding other committers contributions as hostage
No he's not, and you're just trying to be outraged. Just fork the code if you don't trust him. Oh, but you don't want to take his place as the maintainer? Maybe deep down you know that there's still a difference between being in charge and submitting the occasional pull request?
> I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename?
Yes. But that requires someone, or a group, to take responsibility for that and support the fork. Maintaining a filesystem can be a complex undertaking.
> Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.
I think it was more like he was the core of the project with others contributing. Once he was out of the picture no one else had sufficient passion and/or time for it to take on the mantle of project lead sufficiently (to push Reiser4 onward and eventually getting it merged into the mainline Kernel and maintaining Reiser3 in the meantime & further forward).
While Reiser4 is still maintained, it has never been merged into the mainline kernel limiting its support in common Linux distributions. I don't know if that is because the current maintainers have tried to have it merged and failed for some reason, or if they have not pushed of its inclusion at all.
What is deprecated and due to be removed is Reiser3, which is not actively maintained. There are some technical issues that would need addressing soon if it were to remain, and in any case an unmaintained filesystem is a dangerous thing to rely upon if you can avoid doing so. It isn't being removed because of who started it, it is being removed because it is not well enough supported for mainstream safety.
Reiser3 won't be removed until some time in 2025, and unless you need the latest latest kernel at all times an active setup will keep working for a while after that (until the older kernel it uses falls into EOL), so you have plenty of time to migrate if you need to.
If a lot of people were relying on Reiser3 there would be a lot more noise about this. People using Reiser4 are building their own modules (or patching a kernel tree and building it in) already and this will not affect them.
> It's their project, they can do what they please with it.
Who was questioning that? No one, thanks for noticing.
> This is the premise of FOSS, which makes no claims as to how maintainers must communicate with collaborators or how projects must be maintained.
It is not, however, any protection against criticism about what they choose to do with that project. If you open source a program that actively harms any or all of the groups the Lemmy project is (ostensibly) trying to protect in its claim, would that protect you from criticism? Not in the slightest.
> > go against the ideas of free speech and of federation, especially in the open source space
> Those are your values, not the values of the maintainers.
Again, thanks for noticing.
> Maybe their relationship to open source is different than yours.
And?
> Maybe their idea of free speech is different than yours.
Clearly, it's why I'm criticising them.
> This is no more than you forcing your values on them.
> GNU doesn’t strike me as an organisation which places a lot of value on software quality and reliability.
This stems from a misunderstanding of what GNU is. Ideally all projects under the GNU umbrella would work towards a unified operating system, but that's sadly not what it's like. The GNU project is not much of a project in the common sense of the word, nor is it much of an organisation. This is one of the many reasons why https://gnu.tools exists, a subset of GNU with common goals and values, including collaborative project management.
>his decisions seem to have worked out amazingly well.
As someone who regularly deals with bugs and inconsistencies in Linux, I wouldn't say so. For me personally, I just want to be able to fix the issues, and would rather not spend the time bickering with someone who has some kind of personal vendetta about something that I don't know about. I try hard not to dump my baggage on other open source maintainers, I hope others can do the same.
>> RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses
> I think it's clear that the GNU project needs a code of conduct
Why? It seems from your quote that people can be removed without a code and, as the FAANGs show us, a written criteria just gets gamed. A code of conduct is redundant and problematic. It victimizes the trustworthy.
> if the leader is opposed to the idea as much as Stallman is, then it's correct to replace him
The ultimate crime - even above anything in a code of conduct - is not wanting a code of conduct? Is anything else an absolute?
> Did something like that happen with ffmpeg a few years back? A huge amount of the dev work was being done by one at-the-time abrasive guy. They booted him, he forked, the ffmpeg mainline went moribund while the fork line kept getting better.
No, that’s not what happened with ffmpeg.
Multiple developers forked ffmpeg in a somewhat abrasive way because they disagreed with the rest of the team. They wanted to focus on cleaning the code and changing the api while others wanted to keep working on adding features.
Debian switched because the ffmpeg maintainer was part of the group. Sadly for the fork the mainline was very much more reactive and pragmatic than them. Ffmpeg kept merging all the good changes they made while they mostly refused to use ffmpeg code. Then a security auditor found that ffmpeg was good at fixing bugs while the fork did a poor job and that was the end of it. The fork was abandoned.
> Well, this is a problem that FSF created. They tried to unilaterally appoint RMS to the steering committee and were forced to renege when most of GCC's top contributors threatened to walk away from the project.
Do you have a source for this? The story appears to be the opposite - RMS was on the steering committee list since 2012 and was removed earlier this year by the rest of the steering committee as a reaction to RMS being put back as a FSF board member. https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html
I think it will be a while before we see the long term effects of Guido's departure, but I already miss him. The few interactions we had left me feeling that he was good at choosing his yeses and noes appropriately.
This is the part I'm most curious about. Why didn't GNU let him become a maintainer?
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