I don’t have to assume that at all. We’ve got hundreds of accounts of open source maintainers and communities of what happened. Their channels were taken over for mentioning Libera in the topic. No warning was given or possibility for redress before the takeover would happen.
If that didn’t happen like they said, then congrats you’ve discovered a massive conspiracy there. But then again, it should be trivial for anyone including the new staff to provide logs to the contrary.
> As for how this was all handled by the companies involved, well this could be described as a textbook example of how NOT to interact with the Linux kernel community properly. The people and companies involved know what happened, and I’m sure it will all come out eventually
> …I suspect more external impact will be felt as a result of them firing the head of Open Source who's been there for 19 years. :/ Tech press hasn't picked that up yet though.
> I provided many servers, of course, but also 7 figure funding
In my book, that's irrelevant. If i choose to donate personal resources to a project, it does not entitle me to any power over said project.
> fully in charge (...) my ownership
As someone who's external to both Freenode and Libera project, my understanding was that both aimed to be somewhat-horizontal projects and that such fine print was irrelevant. Much like Debian project has a DPL for some specific situations but actual decisions are taken by the base (which has pros and cons).
> Tomaw and I were in discussion...
I'm not saying there was no drama prior to the discussion. I'm saying many people who had a neutral stance on the matter were pushed to exile by your new team's aggressive actions, which you don't seem to refute.
> Finally, stop trying to force or pressure people to leave freenode.
I'm not. I'm always happy to side with an established non-profit versus an unclear business plan driven by an entrepreneur, but in this specific case i have zero balls in the game. You'll find me much more active in XMPP spaces where such concerns are non-existent because user hosting is decoupled from chatroom hosting (via s2s protocol).
> As for me and freenode, we have been in legal discussion to truly decentralize the network and give it to the people
Cool. Despite my profound disagreements on general politics, i wish you the best on this path. I've read more than a few cringy arguments for Freenode in the past months, but i believe all of us can take a turn for the better at any time. Can't wait for the non-profit to be officially registered!
> It was all very disingenuous. It was obvious to everyone, after 8 years of flames, that such a move would have been incendiary. Naftali played dumb only after he was called out on it.
Have you considered that not everyone who forks something participates in the original community?
> I just object to the rewrite of history to justify the mistakes of the past.
So far there has been no evidence for the stated claim, just supposition and rumour. So as-is there's no reason for anyone here to believe that "history is being rewritten" aside from easily-mistaken word of mouth.
These days most discussions over the internet happen via the written word, so it's difficult to believe that you can't find records from IRC, Github, or Email to support your contention that it was hostile.
> I do believe there is a spirit of open source. Like, if everyone in the world behaved the “worst” they could while fulfilling all legal obligations, nothing would be functional at all anywhere.
Yeah, tell me about it, did I fail to mention I actually write widely used open source software, as opposed to the original complainer whose profile indicates little open source activity?
> In that vein, I hope they do contribute upstream where it makes sense to, at the very minimum, like applicable bug fixes.
And where’s the evidence that they aren’t already doing so? Where’s even the evidence that X410 is repackaging? I don’t know either way, but gp just started trashing the software because they sell licenses for 50 bucks a pop, which is not evidence for anything.
No? Where exactly do you think I've theorized about the existence of a conspiracy? Because I've actually said the exact opposite: there isn't a conspiracy and no one is cooperating at all. There's no evil group of developers secretly planning to sabotage everything. It's just the usual bad communication and planning that happens with a distributed team.
>Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work
Can you name what any of these contributions were? Because I've never seen them. I've seen contributions here and there, lots of minor bug fixes, but nothing major.
>Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it
Avoid this rhetoric please. These open source projects are a volunteer collaboration. No one's kissing any rings or trying to get something out of the maintainers, other than the usual: everyone helps each other write and maintain the code.
>but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement
I really don't know what you're talking about here, but disagreeing about technical things isn't "fighting tooth-and-nail". That's a normal part of any project.
Personally I don't think anyone should care about leading the GNU movement, that's been plagued by petty infighting and drama since the very beginning.
> It was not injecting harmful code onto the machine, it was not an "attack" on anything, in any real sense. I feel all the media is doing so far is raking the maintainer over a fire, instead of asking the question of how did we get here in the first place? Why would a maintainer feel they need to take actions like this? What are they trying to achieve?
> Instead of talking about the role of maintainers, consumers, and what to do about the state of open source software and its longevity, we are instead using this moment to go after the maintainer as if they were doing the equivalent of using their npm packages to inject actual malicious, harmful code on the consumer machines, like a cryptominer.
I agree with all of your points. I would be more sympathetic to the backlash if those affected were paying license holders, but that's not what happened.
It is a privilege to use someone's hobby project that you didn't write for free and with no strings attached.
>These aren't companies. It's a communty project and a FOSS project merging resources.
Exactly how other situations historically have started. Lot's of FOSS projects "brought into the fold" to "shepard" along only to not get the resources promised.
> We send the emails to the Linux communityand seek their feedback.
That's not really what they did.
They sent the patches, the patches where either merged or rejected.
And they never let anybody knew that they had introduced security vulnerabilities on the kernel on purpose until they got caught and people started reverting all the patches from their university and banned the whole university.
> 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 am mystified that some people are ready to believe GNOME's take
I won't comment on the issue itself, but the way you're framing this is total and complete nonsense. GNOME didn't have a "take", it was a blog written independently by one developer. You're confusing the Foundation itself with random developers. AFAIK System 76 also never put out any official statements, it was again more random unofficial statements by random employees. I would actually be more disappointed if either of these organizations' management was wasting their time making official statements on pointless open source drama.
> I, Leah Rowe, have re-taken full control of the Libreboot project after 4 years delay in bringing out a new release. [...] The people working on it kept adding too many new features without fixing fundamental issues. I have revoked all of their access to project infrastructure; Libreboot is now lead by me. I have a completely different idea for how to run the project and what a coreboot distro should be.
> Hi, people have made money using my code and I also don’t care
looks like everyone's missing the point.
> I understand this is upsetting to you
Again, maybe I am on another level of comprehension, so I don't understanda why it is so hard for someone to get it, but I am not upset by that, at all.
I simply know that those who think "it will be fine" are delusional and don't know what they are talking about!
So I just will paste some link to relevant news here, maybe it will make things clearer.
It includes the opinion of Antirez, father of one of the most successful OSS ever: Redis. Maybe his words will open your eyes and tear the veil of Maya.
(spoiler ahead alert!)
Basically you work for free and people don't even thank you and the maintainer ends up being doxed or blamed or pushed aside and in the long term the only solution to keep sanity is to resign
> But I don’t see how the GPL is a viable solution to that problem. Not at all
GPL doesn't permit freeloading, that's how
Do you wanna know who the freeloaders are?
Just make a list of companies that do not accept GPL code.
Those are the free loaders.
For people it's even simpler: you don't want to contribute to the project because it's GPL? then you are a freeloader.
Which is not the same of saying that if someone creates a project under Apache license he's a freeloader. There are many reasons to start a project under more permissive licenses, but if you plan to write something that has chances of being successful, think about what you're doing and who got your back.
It's one thing to create Go and make it opensource with Google backing you, another entirely to maintain log4j or GPG or OpenSSH on your free time for years or decades, without even a thank you and people constantly opening issue like "this thing is shit it should be rewritten in Rust" or "this project doesn't have a COC/ the COC is not inclusive enough I will blame you all over the internet" etc. etc.
My Apache/BSD projects are under that license because I know it's code that will be used in a context where GPL would not be accepted, but I also refuse to offer any kind of support whatsoever, basically once you get it, it's yours, I won't even close your issues, I will simply ignore them, that's how much I care about it.
Because I don't care to work on stuff that people are not forced to contribute back to, unless it's for myself.
Need a feature? Show me the money and I will think about implementing it.
> . Not at all. More likely, if I release my code under the GPL not only won’t I get paid, but also nobody will use my software
textbook straw man
you will get paid in code.
Linux is GPL, Vim is GPL, Emacs is GPL, GCC is GPL, Gnome is GPL, KDE is GPL, OpenJDK is GPL, Telegram is GPL, VLC is GPL, Blender is GPL, uBlock Origin is GPL, etc. etc. it's notorious that nobody uses them...
> I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context beyond the commits.
Maybe you should share that first, rather than leaving it implicit. (If your comment tells the whole story I am unconvinced. OK, so the guy merged a patch, then it turns out he did not in fact have the blessing of his employer, so he reverted it with a slightly snarky commit message. Any more context I should be aware of beyond that? It does not sound like a huge conspiracy to me.)
Edit: also, what does "The Management" mean? This guy's immediate supervisor? Intel CEO? I feel like some people are taking an oddly paranoid reading of the situation. I don't know anything about Intel specifically but I have worked at a large company, I am willing to bet that the higher you get in Intel's management the less they care about Ubuntu.
> Really losing my faith in the accuracy of HN if such a huge thread is full of misinformation.
What is the point of dubbing yourself the arbiter of the moral high ground and spreading mis-information in the very next breath?
I am less puzzled by you spreading misinformation than I am by the fact you have this outrage at the very thing you are doing and don't hesitate to attack the character of people you disagree with.
> A number of these patches they submitted to the kernel were indeed successfully merged to the Linux kernel tree.
It turns out the researchers DID allow the bad faith commits to be merged and that is a big problem that is still being unwound.
I don’t have to assume that at all. We’ve got hundreds of accounts of open source maintainers and communities of what happened. Their channels were taken over for mentioning Libera in the topic. No warning was given or possibility for redress before the takeover would happen.
If that didn’t happen like they said, then congrats you’ve discovered a massive conspiracy there. But then again, it should be trivial for anyone including the new staff to provide logs to the contrary.
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