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Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

discourse.gnome.org

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#51
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, also one needs to investigate if the 503c organizations that claim to be in "the public interest" are really in "the private interest". Many software foundations serve their directors and the power of a select group of developers, do not fund actual development and largely serve as self-marketing and propaganda groups.

Your sweeping statement would have more impact if you offered some examples of foundations you think only serve themselves.

Not the person who wrote it but DotNet Foundation comes to mind.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#52
post #43
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely do not, certainly not "often". In many cases mediocre corporate developers who have taken over a project demand more deference in purely technical matters (which they do not understand) and remove opposition. They then close down all communication channels so the real victim (i.e., the person that was removed) cannot tell the truth. Then they engage in vague accusations that there was some other issue…

if the aggrieved party is fictional, then why should the person that was removed not be able to make a statement claiming that the accusations are false?

Because the communication channels that matter are locked down, and the person who was removed is censored. This has happened in multiple projects (I think Debian was the latest), so all developers associated with project $X think that the foundation members are right and the removed person is wrong.

You can set the record straight on your own website and hope that e.g. a HN submission stays longer than 10 min on the front page. Which would again be prevented by the foundation members who will flag.

The web is no longer open like it was in 2000.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#53
post #45
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely do not, certainly not "often". In many cases mediocre corporate developers who have taken over a project demand more deference in purely technical matters (which they do not understand) and remove opposition. They then close down all communication channels so the real victim (i.e., the person that was removed) cannot tell the truth. Then they engage in vague accusations that there was some other issue…

Suggesting that the aggrieved party is fictional is, indeed, criminal libel.

You know perfectly well what was meant despite being technically correct due to the misplaced quotes.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#54

Am I missing something here? The minutes give no real details about anything It's all rather vague

I'm not sure, but code of conduct was breached, so could be the usual whenever code of conduct is brought up.

How do you know "code of conduct was breached"? We only know that there was a complaint, that it was breached.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#55
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're getting at, but this requires far too much trust in the administrators. Transparency is critical in proceedings like this. Also, the statement is worded in a way that suggests he was removed for a cause that is unknown, and independently had a CoC violation brought against him that is still being mediated. Therefore there can be no outcome there yet. Which makes me wonder when they removed him for c…

If you use GNOME, you have inherent trust in that administration as the governing body for the software on your computer. Outside of explicitly checking every line of code and then compiling yourself, there's no way to actually validate what you're truly running on your computer other than that trust. If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

> If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

Regardless of where someone stands in this particular conversation, perceived injustice is bad even for those who are only indirectly affected by it.

I guess that most of the injustice we read about in the media is about something that doesn't directly affect us as a reader.

Yet we are affected by it. This is because people tend to want to contribute to a just society. ..so essentially, people tend to dislike injustice.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#56
post #42
post #17

The minutes for this meeting is not public yet, but in general gnome foundation minutes are extremly vague on all subjects (e.g. "a change was proposed and the board approved it"). Code of conduct issues seem to bring out certain people out of the woodwork. hence to avoid conspiracy theories and witch hunts taking over I think the foundation should explain the situation as soon as possible.

Terse minutes are pretty common across the board (um, no pun intended there). Unless the meeting happens in a chat fora, it's usually a very brief summary. Doubly so when it's a personnel matter because the less said the better.

> Doubly so when it's a personnel matter because the less said the better.

I think it depends. There's probably a whole lot of reasons to select a specific communication strategy around an incident.

If it's an obvious violation of coc, transparency is probably very well received. For example, if you have someone who's allegedly embezzling funds, just announce the investigation, and follow up one way or another.

If it's a bogus claim, you better not be transparent about it. Because with transparency you're creating evidence against yourself, and that's not smart.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#57
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're getting at, but this requires far too much trust in the administrators. Transparency is critical in proceedings like this. Also, the statement is worded in a way that suggests he was removed for a cause that is unknown, and independently had a CoC violation brought against him that is still being mediated. Therefore there can be no outcome there yet. Which makes me wonder when they removed him for c…

If you use GNOME, you have inherent trust in that administration as the governing body for the software on your computer. Outside of explicitly checking every line of code and then compiling yourself, there's no way to actually validate what you're truly running on your computer other than that trust. If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

>If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

GTK?

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#58
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're getting at, but this requires far too much trust in the administrators. Transparency is critical in proceedings like this. Also, the statement is worded in a way that suggests he was removed for a cause that is unknown, and independently had a CoC violation brought against him that is still being mediated. Therefore there can be no outcome there yet. Which makes me wonder when they removed him for c…

If you use GNOME, you have inherent trust in that administration as the governing body for the software on your computer. Outside of explicitly checking every line of code and then compiling yourself, there's no way to actually validate what you're truly running on your computer other than that trust. If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

This is some variant of the "you are using your iPhone while criticizing corporations" argument.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#59
post #16

Ah, the good old gnome drama. They consider users , stupid and make their system as stupid as possible and never let the user to do advance customization as they please. Their gate keeping nature back fired I guess.

[flagged]

Simple , use it , also check their mailing list. Here is the biggest Linus rant about Gnome 3 : https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4...

Gnome3 was a lot more customizable... Now it is a lot worse.

Re: Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

#60
post #41
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I tried was in Ubuntu 20.something and ... yes it was trash.

I'm going to posit that unless you've used GNOME, KDE, etc. on more than one distribution, it's potentially unfair to judge the DE based on that singular experience. I've had very different experiences with various desktops depending on which distribution they are on. Ubuntu tends to customize GNOME more than Fedora, so it's possible that what you didn't like was more to do with Ubuntu than GNOME. (Not dissing Ubuntu…

Frankly, does it matter?

I was forced into ubuntu in that job, so whatever Canonical was shipping was effectively GNOME to me.

Also i looked into dealing with that "flavour" of gnome and the settings availability was just poor. Even XFCE which is a way smaller project does have more and better settings.

And let's not even pull KDE into the discussion, KDE has literally TONS of options.

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