41–50 of 100 posts
My hope is that the project continues irrespective of its relationship to other organizations. It's pretty damn important.
I don't necessarily agree. Coreboot is important. Libreboot is nice to have.
Context: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/54agii/richard_stall... Original email that sparked the controversy: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg00036...
Is the reddit user "BaronHK" the same person who posted http://zammit.org/libreboot-screwup.html or just someone quoting it? My sense is he's the latter, but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, the zammit.org statement sounds like it's a more believable reflection of the libreboot community. All the libreboot.org stuff reads too much like one perhaps-toxic person getting up on a soapbox.
Quite possible, and sadly seems to be happening more and more within the FOSS world.
All due respect for Leah Rowe and her work on libreboot, but this kind of drama only hurts the OpenSource (regardless of the name you like to use) initiative. Stallman did the right thing I guess.
I don't think it's fair to lay the blame for the drama at her feet. The FSF could have handled this more professionally from the beginning.
Leah Rowe however was the toxic and crazy drama queen who couldn't keep a civil tone, and even her initial email included the word "fuck".
To top it off, she had zero proof for her allegations, and the person she claimed to represent specifically didn't want her to raise those allegations in her name.
In the rest of the world, we refer that as slander and libel. She should be happy nobody bothered to sue her. On either end.
Given Leah's behavior, I cannot see how on earth the FSF could have acted more level headed, reasonable and professional.
Seriously... what did they not do right?
Sounds like half the story. The libreboot website says that they left GNU to protest transgender discrimination at the FSF.[0] [0] https://libreboot.org/
sounds like 9/10ths of the story. the transgender person who left sounded very unstable and unprofessional. Not surprising the organization wanted to completely divorce themselves from someone who acts irrationally.
The person who got fired from GNU hasn't said a word on the subject, and there's no evidence of her being unstable and unprofessional. Leah Rowe, on the other hand, was indeed acting unstable and unprofessional. The really sad thing was that Rowe's flip-out actually outed her friend, who was stealth, so she wound up hurting a fellow trans person far more than the FSF allegedly did (and due to Rowe's instability, I have difficulty believing her version of why her friend was fired).
E-drama aside, this is probably for the better, given the following: - The developer has sole commit rights against the repo and hence no further would could be done on it without forking. - The developer's continued trashing of the FSF poisoned the well for any number of people who might have wanted to work on Libreboot, GNU-version or otherwise. The fact is, no one wants to be part of a "contentious" fork. It's a p…
For a bit more context: Her full-time job is Minifree, a company she founded that sells computers with Libreboot pre-installed. Minifree has then contracted other developers to work on support for more hardware.
Looking at how one-sided the discussion here but especially on reddit is should be worrying. Not saying it's the case, we all don't know, but if the accusations are right, it's absolutely reasonable to not want to work with these people. You can say all you want about being professional and not having politics influence your technical decisions, but that's easy to say if it's not your life style choices that are disc…
This is from http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg00036... LR> I'm declaring here and now to the whole world that Libreboot is no longer LR> part of the GNU project. I do not believe that the FSF or the GNU project LR> deserve to exist. Mistakes are everywhere and are done by everybody. A mistake was done by some people in FSF, the reaction is exaggerated to say the least. Furthermore, it's not clea…
Next day, a thread with every manager in the planet saying our team was stonewalling everything, being unhelpful, etc. etc.
My boss would come up to my cube and say, "Stop e-mailing these people! Why are you e-mailing them? Pick up the phone and call them!"
I hate to rush judgement, but looking at the statements that are out, I am really unhappy with her approach, her statements and her totalism. Just because you don't agree with a policy doesn't mean the FSF shouldn't exist. Pulling your project feels reactionary.
I'm guilty of reactionary anger too. I'm human, we're all human. We feel like we've been wronged often by our neighbours or our landlords or police. This might have just been a bad week for her and some rushed decision making. But if she's always like this and doesn't learn from it, then she'll find herself alone in other communities in the future.
Just a side note, there was a good video by School of Life on anger. I don't actually agree with all of it. Their premise is weird, but it would actually put her reaction to the FSF in a different light:
This is from http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg00036... LR> I'm declaring here and now to the whole world that Libreboot is no longer LR> part of the GNU project. I do not believe that the FSF or the GNU project LR> deserve to exist. Mistakes are everywhere and are done by everybody. A mistake was done by some people in FSF, the reaction is exaggerated to say the least. Furthermore, it's not clea…
So you don't know anything about the project beside that their main/core maintainer accuses GNU project to have fired a trans person and therefor she doesn't want to work there anymore.
Call me SJW or Gutmensch but if that makes you 'easily say' that she is 'apparently toxic', you are a prime example for what is going wrong in tech.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't necessarily agree. Coreboot is important. Libreboot is nice to have.
Is that because there is very little original development occurring in Libreboot (it's my understanding that it's basically Coreboot with some binary blobs removed but not actually replaced).
Recently TrueCrypt has disappeared, TOR got new management (a bunch of suits), etc.
Personal spats aside, these projects are bigger than the organizations and people who sacrifice so much to contribute to them.
I might recommend to the FSF and GNU that these sorts of projects need to be given special attention with regard to their continued existence, the happiness and healthiness of the contributors, the transparency of internal activities, and the thwarting of intelligence/infiltration activity.
The continued, healthy existence of free software depends not only on the code but on the institutions and the people who provide, advertise, decide and distribute that code.