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Leaving F-Droid
- jgrishamhesrt 3y agoThis gives me the same feeling as the prior Linus and RMS attacks. Like an organised attempt to weaponise CoC to destroy the public image of someone important in open source. Hopefully it fails.
- aredox 3y agoThank you, sockpuppet account created one day ago to comment on a flagged story
- c0balt 3y agoFyi, linked in the post is the statement in the fdroid GitLab org, https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/447 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/447. This provides a bit more context. It also contains a reply from Hans regarding this statement.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoFurther context is in the resignation statement of another community council member, which someone made private "because I felt like it" (actual quote and sole justification.) https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/446 https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.co... Edit: since multiple trolls are in the thread, this isn't just one person. Multiple people simultaneously resigned from the community council. Edit: the entire community council. Three people - the fourth was the F-droid board's representative. More about the community council: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/call-for-volunteers-f-droid-community-council/23221 https://forum.f-droid.org/t/call-for-volunteers-f-droid-comm... It sounds like F-droid established a governing board this year and one of their first actions was to address complaints from contributors about how Hans was running things. The board established the community council, Hans kept doing whatever he wanted, and the board didn't act, so much of the community council resigned? Edit: I think the entire community council quit, given the fourth member is their board representative?
- lucideer 3y ago> which someone made private "because I felt like it" Further to making statements in their own community private, it seems even this HN post has been flagged by someone for some reason...
- KennyBlanken 3y agoAnd I'm unable to vouch for it like I usually can - but I an also flag it if I wanted to? I don't know what that means. HN moderation is such a black box.
- jdorfman 3y agoWhat is ComCo?
- mikelovenotwar 3y agoCommunity Council https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/447 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/447
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- concordDance 3y agoI'm quite unclear on what thos drama is about and what the consequences of it are.
- rodlette 3y ago+1. This style of public post that say "I'm leaving because of problems which I am not disclosing" are odd.
- aredox 3y agoWho are you talking about? Hans? "According to Hans, "many people" have expressed "concerns" about me -- though for some reason not during the period expressly meant for people to voice those, apparently only to him in private, mysteriously never mentioned before now, and that cannot be named for some reason. Concerns that are simultaneously both too unimportant to address so I can defend myself (and apparently not an issue for me joining ComCo), yet more than enough for Hans to unilaterally block me from getting Maintainer status on gitlab, even though the board -- including Hans -- voted to grant me that, which Hans then blocked for weeks using a myriad of counterfactuals as justification."
- rodlette 3y agoThe author, who notes: > Sadly, this is not a single incident -- if it was I would still believe things could be fixed -- but a pattern of behaviour that has continued for years. I've tried to be patient, hoping we could still resolve things, give everyone the benefit of the doubt as I constantly have. But clearly, this is not possible as long as Hans refuses any and all accountability for his actions, and any attempts at mediation to resolve the interpersonal friction and conflicts. > > Hans' actions have repeatedly hurt me (and others) This post is light on details. If there were many incidents, some details would be available.
- aredox 3y agoAnd the fact several other people have resigned?
- cantrememberit 3y agoNothing quite shows how deserving one is of filling a responsible role than dragging personal conflicts into the public and - without providing proper context - blaming other people for it. My congratulations to Hans; as it turns out, he has done the F-Droid project yet another excellent service.
- KaiserPro 3y ago> My congratulations to Hans; as it turns out, he has done the F-Droid project yet another excellent service. From the outside it looks like Hans is not following rules and procedures. This is never good for an active community.
- lemper 3y agoDo you have some other insight? tfa seems to paint hans as a passive aggressive dude. in the gitlab issue, another person shows up and gave a similar statement about hans. and in the latest reply by hans, it seems that he takes the L.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoMultiple people simultaneously resigned from the community board at the same time, which makes it very clear it's not this 'one person dragging their personal stuff into public'.
- jorvi 3y agoHans did not “take the L”. Its pretty obvious he’s trying to push past it ASAP with a vague semi-apology and asking that “bygones be bygones”, without taking any serious time or effort to address the issues and concerns.
- remram 3y agoThis is quite serious. The only point of f-droid is to be a community repository, if it is controlled by a single individual doing harmful things with no oversight, it is over as far as I'm concerned.
- sam_lowry_ 3y agoLike Linus on the kernel?
- ses1984 3y agoSure you can consider Linux over as far as you’re concerned.
- globalnode 3y agoSure, linux can be over, f-droid can be over... i mean linux doesnt even work except for the use case of convenient cli, file management, and networked servers.
- oytis 3y agoWhat is weird about this situation is I can't find any public information about Hans holding any special powers in the project. He's neither the original creator nor an officially appointed BDFL. Maybe he just happens to hold important access rights in the system that let him block people? Or is more assertive than others? Hard to tell
- KennyBlanken 3y agoHe's "Technical Lead" https://f-droid.org/en/2023/03/20/f-droid-board.html https://f-droid.org/en/2023/03/20/f-droid-board.html
- lucideer 3y agoOne of the issues raised is that the Council approved maintainership privileges for one individual & Hans refused to grant them - this gives me the impression that 1 single individual has exclusive access to grant such privileges (typically "Owner" role): it seems pretty unusual for a community project to have a single Owner role. Even just for efficiency & them being a bottleneck / bus-factor.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> me for trying to hold Hans accountable for blocking protecting marginalised community members from abuse I think understanding this statement is key. Blocking what protections? From what abuse? How and when were they blocked? Without that context, it's hard to say this text has any more clarity than the text accuses Hans' responses of having.
- Karliss 3y agoThere might have been other stuff but the best I could tell from the linked pages: "blocking protection" refers to not giving full owner or mainter permissions to gitlab instance. Which are the required account levels to allow editing and deleting parts of issues and merge requests and other content. But those account levels also include a bunch of important technical permissions like managing deployment keys, access tokens, branch protection settings, none which should be required for people enforcing CoC. Default Gitlab setup doesn't have roles which would be suitable for community moderators. But it seems like Gitlab Ultimate has support for custom roles which could have solved that issue. No idea if F-Droid is in the Gitlab Open-Source program which gives open source projects access to premium features.
- ecmascript 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- g-b-r 3y agoNo. This is clearer, and Sylvia is much more widely known: https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/446 https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.co...
- ecmascript 3y agoLink doesn't load for me.
- g-b-r 3y agoVery weird If you mean that on mobile the right (stupid) sidebar covers half the page, it has an apparently invisible close button on its upper right
- ecmascript 3y agoNo I meant that it did not load. But it did now. I read it. I still don't understand what the problem is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- lucideer 3y ago@dang given the subject of this post is censoring statements made within their own community, I'm concerned about how quickly this was dropped off frontpage due to being flagged here on HN - wondering if this is potentially an abuse of the flag button (by sockpuppets?). If not and this flagging was approved by mods for legitimate reasons please ignore this comment.
- em-bee 3y agoi might flag this because the statement is to vague to merit any public discussion outside of the people involved. all we get is speculations and accusations, that are not worthy of a discussion on hackernews, in my opinion.
- ibejoeb 3y agoThat's true, but then contrast that to the treatment of the openai situation, where there were 1000+ comment threads devoted to vague tweets. (The "I Love You All" = Ilya thing was particularly wacky.)
- Timshel 3y agoI disagree, we might not be able to acertain the truth but I certainly want to know that there is some potential issues.
- em-bee 3y agotrue, but without details we are not able to find out anything about the nature of these issues, and therefore it is not possible to draw any conclusions that would be helpful. i am an f-droid user, and i am certainly concerned if there are issues in the community. but this post does not help to enlighten matters and i feel it will only attract vocal outsiders who have nothing substantial to contribute. this issue needs to be handled internally by the active f-droid contributors, and if they are not issuing public statements with details on what is actually going on then the rest of us should stand back. i doubt any message here is going to be helpful in resolving issues or even just learning more.
- wesapien 3y ago[flagged]
- gazby 3y agoI briefly joined some F-Droid Dev rooms in hopes of helping with their speed/capacity issues by chasing some CDN sponsorships or expanding the mirror list, however the possibility that any commercial provider or user-provided mirror might have access logs enabled was enough to end the conversation. I 180'd after that. Never was a community-run project IME.
- lucideer 3y ago> Never was a community-run project IME. That's the impression given by posts linked here. The initiative to begin trying to transform it into a community-run project seems to have kicked off roughly 12 months or so ago[0] - and by all accounts seems to have been met with significant resistance from the bdfl that preceded it. [0] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/commit/031eeb78c8e35960a9ad280e39ded7453fcd552a https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/commit/031eeb78c8e35960a9a...
- LjLies 3y agoThe thing is that the BDFL was never appointed as such, either. The project's founder is Ciaran Gultnieks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciaran_Gultnieks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciaran_Gultnieks and Ciaran, while largely silent, still "holds the master keys" (figuratively and somewhat literally). As an F-Droid member myself, albeit a completely tangential and pointless one, the only things I know about why Hans is _de facto_ leader and cannot be overridden even by the bodies created for overseeing the entire project are a couple of factors mentioned right here: that he is the only one with Owner access on GitLab, and that he is Technical Lead, "initially", in the board: https://f-droid.org/en/2023/03/20/f-droid-board.html https://f-droid.org/en/2023/03/20/f-droid-board.html
- lucideer 3y ago> Hans is _de facto_ leader In these kind of situations, "de facto" is usually the same as "actual" for all practical purposes.
- em-bee 3y ago
- the_third_wave 3y agoWithout more information this just comes across as yet another Code of Conduct struggle session. Depending on which position an uninformed observer - and that means all of us here - takes it is either the result of Hans being an authoritarian *-ist/*-phobe hell-bent on playing power games or of Hans successfully fighting the multi-headed woke Hydra which intends to turn the project into yet another vessel for spreading its ideology. I'm an avid F-Droid user so I do have a vested interest in the project remaining active and on-target. As it stands I do not know whether Hans' actions helped to keep the project healthy or had the opposite effect. Does anyone here know more?
- ImJamal 3y agoIdeology has already prevailed. They refused to let the Gab app on FDroid because they allow "things like racism, sexism, verbal abuse, violent nationalist propaganda, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, antisemitism and a lot more things". Interestingly enough they allow 4Chan apps which has all of those things. It is almost as though they are opposed to Gab specifically not against those things and were just coming up with an excuse and hoped nobody saw their double standards.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smegsicle 3y agois it just me or has there been an unlikely number of strange restructurings recently? unity and openai as the most high profile, but also in niche places like yahtzee crowshaw / escapist mag, and now even fdroid maybe a covid aftershock, have there been any others?
- KaiserPro 3y agounity and escapist are down to money. Openai is ego based
- gettodachoppa 3y ago[flagged]
- g-b-r 3y agoIt's very important people who left, not some random new member
- g-b-r 3y agoF*ck Sylvia too??? I do remember not liking Hans much, I hope they start their own project but this is a huge mess and a horrible news for Android!!!
- g-b-r 3y agoIf someone has the ability to unflag this he should
- aredox 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522653
- doffi 3y ago[flagged]