Sharing a proactive update as we aim to also have more transparency in all processes.
We wanted to share that we are aware of the open letter which has been made regarding one of our board members.
As a general community norm we do ask to raise concerns inside one of the established open community channels. While open letters are a valid mechanism, we hope that it can be seen truly as a last resort that comes after exhausting other options. We understand the importance of transparent and accountable leadership within our community, and we still have faith in the potential of constructive discussion, especially when calling out specific individuals.
If you think that a problem needs to be taken care of by the board, please by all means go talk to us. The board has an email address, each board member is easily reachable.
As we review, we wholeheartedly invite anyone concerned or interested to work together towards solutions to reach out, work together with us on open tickets, help define the prioritization of efforts happening.
That is probably because you never contributed anything to the project. You just seem to have joined only for these recent discussions since it’s the only thing you ever participate in, and usually in an instigating and divisive way. I would even go out of my way to call you a troll account. Not sure what your motivations are, but they seem to be rather disingenuous and not for the good of the project.
I’m known for my contributions to the Nix project, but I avoid using my real name on my Discourse account to prevent being targeted by a vocal minority. I don’t want to become a casualty like those mentioned in this document.
The role of the Foundation and board is to foster and promote the success of the broader project and the community that builds it and benefits from it. A lot of the time, that involves sedate and tedious administrative issues that are largely hands-off, and I appreciate the largely thankless and invisible work that goes on here. It’s easy for most of us to forget this.
Sometimes, as now, it needs to be much more hands-on and decisive. It’s perhaps easy, from the other side, to miss when the calmer, slower processes and norms aren’t enough or aren’t working. It’s good to see acknowledgement that the open letters published as a last resort are being heeded.
The essential issue for me is trust. I want to be able to trust that the people working on the software at the core of what I do every single day are able to collaborate, work together, not sabotage each other’s efforts. They don’t have to agree on everything, and indeed should be able to work despite differences, and to solve them safely and constructively where there are genuine intellectual conflicts and decisions to be made.
If my friends (and, frankly, anyone else) aren’t safe participating, why should I trust the project and its output at all? If the project leadership can’t deal with trolls and explicit, visible bad-faith actors, what hope does it have to detect and respond to more subtle malevolent activity, such as we have all seen recently exposed in xz?
This is the existential issue. Some have already made their decisions publicly. Many others have done so quietly, or will do so soon.
I appreciate the thoughtful notes here and understanding as well. Also appreciate all the notes that were sent in other channels as it’s key for me in getting deeper into matters.
On a personal note I view this as the highest priority and we are working on the initial board statement that I hope to post by Tuesday.
Seeing as the response to the public letter was published on the det sys blog, is the flow stated in this thread actually still accurate?
The blog post calls for a migration to the det sys community, while giving no indication of any other change - including no board composition change. So that’s presumably a core board member responding by actively encouraging community split & migration to a commercial entity, while somehow accusations of conflicts of interest are denied?
Is there a thread of logic here somewhere? At this stage clarity is badly missing and top level views mostly resemble barefaced political corruption of old. It is really hard to see foundation behaviour as benign in any of this.
To be super clear, the blog post made by Eelco on the DetSys blog was fully done/owned by DetSys/Eelco. It is apparently their own response and the board/foundation wasn’t involved at all. We all read it for the first time with everyone else after seeing it was published.
I still plan to write up and share the board statement as outlined above.
If people cannot work under their true identities due to fear, we do not know who is maintaining a project. This opens the way for a catch-22 trust breakdown, as no-one can be sure who is who and bad actors could easily be at work. That way the witch-hunters actually risk the project.
I read the open letter as an invitation to move one’s focus of both cooperation and work to a commercial company. This is so totally and utterly perplexing that it looks like it reveals something very fishy indeed with knobs on. FOSS on !