10 ms·

Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

66 points by OmegaDungeon 2y ago

natewrench 2y ago
are they going to remove his contributions to gnome?
natewrench 2y ago
1. Grant of License Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, the licensor hereby grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute the work, provided that you adhere to the Code of Conduct detailed in Section 2. 2. Code of Conduct All users of the licensed work must: Treat others with respect, fairness, and dignity. Not engage in harassment, discrimination, or any form of abusive behavior. Foster an inclusive and welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. Respect the intellectual property rights of others. Refrain from using the licensed work for any unlawful or unethical purposes. 3. Termination This license is automatically terminated if you fail to comply with the Code of Conduct in Section 2. Upon termination, you must: Cease all use, reproduction, modification, and distribution of the licensed work. Destroy any copies of the licensed work in your possession.
athenian200 2y ago
While I agree that the GNOME Foundation is a private organization that, in practice, has the right to decide who is allowed to participate without talking about that process publicly, that doesn't mean that should be exempted from negative consequences to their collective reputation for exercising that right in a way that makes it appear that they are not a transparent organization and operate as a kind of star chamber internally. Not only does it go against long-established principles and ideals of our society in a lot of ways, to the point that I think even many proprietary software developers would be somewhat uncomfortable with decisions about justice and punishment taking place behind closed doors (even if they're fine with source code being closed), but it goes against the spirit of open source, which is rooted as a concept in the notion that transparency is good and opacity is harmful. I am concerned that the idea that victims should have their identities kept private to protect them from harassment is increasingly used as an excuse to punish people suspected of wrongdoing in private proceedings and not disclose much if anything about the evidence or the nature of the proceedings, and instead demanding that the public trust authority figures behind closed doors. That is, transparency and openness seem to be vanishing from society in general, in favor of an emphasis on security and a victim's right to privacy, which means we're back to a system where most proceedings take place behind closed doors. Sure, official legal proceedings might still be open, but almost everything of importance these days happens within the domain of very large private organizations and their regulations, meaning that their internal processes affect us almost as much as laws do in some cases. I worry not only for the future of GNOME, but also for the future of open source and open societies based on the principles of transparency in general. It's possible that the Internet making everything so connected and causing information to flow so rapidly has made it so that it is too dangerous to be open, and thus freedom and transparency are ultimately being killed by the combination of technology and private ownership favoring authoritarian approaches and unilateral, backroom decision making.
sjdkaf 2y ago
[flagged]
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >A bunch of nerds with no social competence who make up their imaginary "committees" and give themselves "director" titles prepare for another public shaming and mobbing. Have you seen the GNOME Foundation? At least the staff is mostly as far away from Nerd as you can be, it contains HR people, that is far, far worse than Nerds, when it comes to backstabbing and rumours. (I don't know why GNOME has around a dozen (full-time?) employees, managing the project. What are they even doing? Just internal politics?)
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20240527 https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20240527 This is simultaneous hilarious and frightening. Wtf is going on at GNOME?
  - Supermancho 2y ago
    > Wtf is going on at GNOME? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, for a long time, afaict.
    - analognoise 2y ago
      Same as GNU, seems like a moribund organization.
  - cosmin800 2y ago
    Nothing else than taking some peasants and giving them a bodyguard uniform and now they feel more entitled than the building landord himself.
  - tssge 2y ago
    Now I don't know what the parent said, but if you mean frightening as in taking up people's time, worry not, as commonly in small orgs such meetings don't take place in reality even though the minutes might indicate so. These minutes may be signed by the attendees via email (or mail) without ever meeting up in reality. This is very common for small orgs where communication is already daily or the matter is trivial in the first place. The reason minutes are signed at all in such cases is to have a paper trail of the decisions and a date for the meeting held, as that might be a legal requirement. As an example in our company when approving accounts, all of us have already seen the accounts multiple times. We have been there when the accounts were being made. The minutes of the meeting are more like a formal paper stating that we know what the accounts contain and approve their content, but it's not like we usually schedule an actual meeting just to waste each other's time. Of course if there's say disagreement with the matter amongst attendees, it is essential to hold a proper meeting.
LeeCyriaca 2y ago
Am I missing something here? The minutes give no real details about anything It's all rather vague
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  I'm not sure, but code of conduct was breached, so could be the usual whenever code of conduct is brought up.
  - p-e-w 2y ago
    The code of conduct consists of individual provisions, articles, and paragraphs. It should be easy (in fact, it should be a prerequisite for such actions being taken) to cite the specific provisions of the CoC that were supposedly violated, and to enter that information into the record. That this didn't happen speaks volumes.
  - funcDropShadow 2y ago
    How do you know "code of conduct was breached"? We only know that there was a complaint, that it was breached.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      AFAIK, the word "breached" can also be interpreted as "brought up in discussion". So maybe that was what the GP meant.
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        Or, come to think of it, is the phrase "the subject was broached in the discussion" what I was thinking of? Note the 'o', not 'e'. Sorry, now I'm thinking I was wrong above.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- p-e-w 2y ago
motohagiography 2y ago
Does free software have academic title IX courts? Even while there may be legit complaints against someone, I'm very suspicious of FOSS governance being abused as a network of star chambers of people with a tremendous amount of influence on the security and privacy of user machines. A metadata tag and registry of whether FOSS dependencies are governed by a non-profit and the organizations we have exposure to seems like an emerging need.
- djfhag 2y ago
  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.
  - oliwarner 2y ago
    Your sweeping statement would have more impact if you offered some examples of foundations you think only serve themselves.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      Well, the Gnome Foundation sure seems to be sailing up as a candidate...
    - whaleofatw2022 2y ago
      Not the person who wrote it but DotNet Foundation comes to mind.
cosmin800 2y ago
Gnome is kind of junk nowdays, right? Haven't used since slack 7.
- sshine 2y ago
  On the contrary. I hadn’t used gnome since 2017, and back then it was absolute junk. Upon installing NixOS two weeks ago, I went with the default desktop environment for while, and this was gnome. I thought at first that NixOS had tweaked gnome into being nice, but my colleague assured me that this is how gbome is today. More mimalistic, drawing inspiration from macOS. I still have to remove stuff rather than add stuff to get to where I want. But it wasn’t the first thing I removed on a new install.
- znpy 2y ago
  Last time I tried was in Ubuntu 20.something and ... yes it was trash.
  - lotharcable 2y ago
    Ubuntu desktop is Ubuntu desktop, not Gnome desktop. It uses Gnome but it isn't Gnome.
    - 3v1n0 2y ago
      It's 99% GNOME with few additions that can be disabled if you want a more pure experience
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
      By that definition virtually nobody uses Windows. Shipping gnome with extensions doesn't make it not Gnome. It is in fact the only Gnome that the majority of users have used given the relative popularity of Ubuntu vs Fedora.
  - jzb 2y ago
    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 here - I tested 24.04 recently and it was fine. I actually liked some of their customizations.)
v3ss0n 2y ago
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.
- tacosukoneko 2y ago
  In their defense, users are stupid and that's why Linux and FreeBSD haven't yet replaced Windows. I recommend GNOME to inexperienced users, and they actually like it and find it intuitive. It accelerates Linux and FreeBSD adoption, which automatically improves the entire freedesktop ecosystem, nobody can deny that. No matter what drama happens, at the end of the day, almost all our distros can run the same apps natively, making every improvement for one a direct or indirect improvement for all.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bananamerica 2y ago
    Have you actually used vanilla Gnome? I did it fairly recently. Gnome 46 is like a fridge. It has fewer graphically exposed settings than Windows 95. I literally had to install a program to scale my wallpaper. It's absolutely ridiculous. I understand this is a forum for programmers, but it's unrealistic to expect real users to manipulate a program like that by rewriting its source code, or even through dconf.
    - lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
      I know absolutely nothing about Gnome, but my comment wasn't about Gnome specifically. It just grabbed my attention when people say "software X treats people like they're stupid", and then they want things done for them.
      - bananamerica 2y ago
daghamm 2y ago
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.
- jzb 2y ago
  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.
  - fwn 2y ago
    > 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.
isantop 2y ago
CoC violations — particularly ones egregious enough to warrant removal from a project — often involve topics of a highly sensitive nature regarding events which could potentially reveal the identity of the victim party, which is entirely not appropriate. While I completely understand the frustration around the current lack of communication regarding this incident, it's fully appropriate given the situation at hand and those party to the proceedings are the only ones at liberty to discuss what happened.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  Saw this on the thread: > I think that choosing to reveal that it is a code of conduct violation, but then refusing to state why, is less responsible than both being completely transparent, or saying nothing. I worry that it could start unnecessary drama.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Yeah, I saw that too. Not about to get a posting ID there, so I'll say here what I thought there: > I worry that it could start unnecessary drama. What that commenter apparently missed was the worse possibility (or probability), that it will suppress "drama" that would have been necessary.
- djfhag 2y ago
  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 that cannot be mentioned in order to "protect a fictional aggrieved party". Which is criminal libel.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    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?
evasb 2y ago
The problem is that, looking back at GNOME history, we get curious about what really happened. But Sonny is not protesting or something, so we cannot say anything about it.

66 points by OmegaDungeon 2y ago

are they going to remove his contributions to gnome?

1. Grant of License Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, the licensor hereby grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute the work, provided that you adhere to the Code of Conduct detailed in Section 2. 2. Code of Conduct All users of the licensed work must: Treat others with respect, fairness, and dignity. Not engage in harassment, discrimination, or any form of abusive behavior. Foster an inclusive and welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. Respect the intellectual property rights of others. Refrain from using the licensed work for any unlawful or unethical purposes. 3. Termination This license is automatically terminated if you fail to comply with the Code of Conduct in Section 2. Upon termination, you must: Cease all use, reproduction, modification, and distribution of the licensed work. Destroy any copies of the licensed work in your possession.

athenian200 2y ago

While I agree that the GNOME Foundation is a private organization that, in practice, has the right to decide who is allowed to participate without talking about that process publicly, that doesn't mean that should be exempted from negative consequences to their collective reputation for exercising that right in a way that makes it appear that they are not a transparent organization and operate as a kind of star chamber internally. Not only does it go against long-established principles and ideals of our society in a lot of ways, to the point that I think even many proprietary software developers would be somewhat uncomfortable with decisions about justice and punishment taking place behind closed doors (even if they're fine with source code being closed), but it goes against the spirit of open source, which is rooted as a concept in the notion that transparency is good and opacity is harmful. I am concerned that the idea that victims should have their identities kept private to protect them from harassment is increasingly used as an excuse to punish people suspected of wrongdoing in private proceedings and not disclose much if anything about the evidence or the nature of the proceedings, and instead demanding that the public trust authority figures behind closed doors. That is, transparency and openness seem to be vanishing from society in general, in favor of an emphasis on security and a victim's right to privacy, which means we're back to a system where most proceedings take place behind closed doors. Sure, official legal proceedings might still be open, but almost everything of importance these days happens within the domain of very large private organizations and their regulations, meaning that their internal processes affect us almost as much as laws do in some cases. I worry not only for the future of GNOME, but also for the future of open source and open societies based on the principles of transparency in general. It's possible that the Internet making everything so connected and causing information to flow so rapidly has made it so that it is too dangerous to be open, and thus freedom and transparency are ultimately being killed by the combination of technology and private ownership favoring authoritarian approaches and unilateral, backroom decision making.

sjdkaf 2y ago

[flagged]

constantcrying 2y ago
>A bunch of nerds with no social competence who make up their imaginary "committees" and give themselves "director" titles prepare for another public shaming and mobbing. Have you seen the GNOME Foundation? At least the staff is mostly as far away from Nerd as you can be, it contains HR people, that is far, far worse than Nerds, when it comes to backstabbing and rumours. (I don't know why GNOME has around a dozen (full-time?) employees, managing the project. What are they even doing? Just internal politics?)
constantcrying 2y ago
>https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20240527 https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20240527 This is simultaneous hilarious and frightening. Wtf is going on at GNOME?
- Supermancho 2y ago
  > Wtf is going on at GNOME? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, for a long time, afaict.
  - analognoise 2y ago
    Same as GNU, seems like a moribund organization.
- cosmin800 2y ago
  Nothing else than taking some peasants and giving them a bodyguard uniform and now they feel more entitled than the building landord himself.
- tssge 2y ago
  Now I don't know what the parent said, but if you mean frightening as in taking up people's time, worry not, as commonly in small orgs such meetings don't take place in reality even though the minutes might indicate so. These minutes may be signed by the attendees via email (or mail) without ever meeting up in reality. This is very common for small orgs where communication is already daily or the matter is trivial in the first place. The reason minutes are signed at all in such cases is to have a paper trail of the decisions and a date for the meeting held, as that might be a legal requirement. As an example in our company when approving accounts, all of us have already seen the accounts multiple times. We have been there when the accounts were being made. The minutes of the meeting are more like a formal paper stating that we know what the accounts contain and approve their content, but it's not like we usually schedule an actual meeting just to waste each other's time. Of course if there's say disagreement with the matter amongst attendees, it is essential to hold a proper meeting.

LeeCyriaca 2y ago

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

giancarlostoro 2y ago
I'm not sure, but code of conduct was breached, so could be the usual whenever code of conduct is brought up.
- p-e-w 2y ago
  The code of conduct consists of individual provisions, articles, and paragraphs. It should be easy (in fact, it should be a prerequisite for such actions being taken) to cite the specific provisions of the CoC that were supposedly violated, and to enter that information into the record. That this didn't happen speaks volumes.
- funcDropShadow 2y ago
  How do you know "code of conduct was breached"? We only know that there was a complaint, that it was breached.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    AFAIK, the word "breached" can also be interpreted as "brought up in discussion". So maybe that was what the GP meant.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      Or, come to think of it, is the phrase "the subject was broached in the discussion" what I was thinking of? Note the 'o', not 'e'. Sorry, now I'm thinking I was wrong above.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
p-e-w 2y ago

motohagiography 2y ago

Does free software have academic title IX courts? Even while there may be legit complaints against someone, I'm very suspicious of FOSS governance being abused as a network of star chambers of people with a tremendous amount of influence on the security and privacy of user machines. A metadata tag and registry of whether FOSS dependencies are governed by a non-profit and the organizations we have exposure to seems like an emerging need.

djfhag 2y ago
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.
- oliwarner 2y ago
  Your sweeping statement would have more impact if you offered some examples of foundations you think only serve themselves.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Well, the Gnome Foundation sure seems to be sailing up as a candidate...
  - whaleofatw2022 2y ago
    Not the person who wrote it but DotNet Foundation comes to mind.

cosmin800 2y ago

Gnome is kind of junk nowdays, right? Haven't used since slack 7.

sshine 2y ago
On the contrary. I hadn’t used gnome since 2017, and back then it was absolute junk. Upon installing NixOS two weeks ago, I went with the default desktop environment for while, and this was gnome. I thought at first that NixOS had tweaked gnome into being nice, but my colleague assured me that this is how gbome is today. More mimalistic, drawing inspiration from macOS. I still have to remove stuff rather than add stuff to get to where I want. But it wasn’t the first thing I removed on a new install.
znpy 2y ago
Last time I tried was in Ubuntu 20.something and ... yes it was trash.
- lotharcable 2y ago
  Ubuntu desktop is Ubuntu desktop, not Gnome desktop. It uses Gnome but it isn't Gnome.
  - 3v1n0 2y ago
    It's 99% GNOME with few additions that can be disabled if you want a more pure experience
  - michaelmrose 2y ago
    By that definition virtually nobody uses Windows. Shipping gnome with extensions doesn't make it not Gnome. It is in fact the only Gnome that the majority of users have used given the relative popularity of Ubuntu vs Fedora.
- jzb 2y ago
  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 here - I tested 24.04 recently and it was fine. I actually liked some of their customizations.)

v3ss0n 2y ago

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.

tacosukoneko 2y ago
In their defense, users are stupid and that's why Linux and FreeBSD haven't yet replaced Windows. I recommend GNOME to inexperienced users, and they actually like it and find it intuitive. It accelerates Linux and FreeBSD adoption, which automatically improves the entire freedesktop ecosystem, nobody can deny that. No matter what drama happens, at the end of the day, almost all our distros can run the same apps natively, making every improvement for one a direct or indirect improvement for all.
lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
[flagged]
- bananamerica 2y ago
  Have you actually used vanilla Gnome? I did it fairly recently. Gnome 46 is like a fridge. It has fewer graphically exposed settings than Windows 95. I literally had to install a program to scale my wallpaper. It's absolutely ridiculous. I understand this is a forum for programmers, but it's unrealistic to expect real users to manipulate a program like that by rewriting its source code, or even through dconf.
  - lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
    I know absolutely nothing about Gnome, but my comment wasn't about Gnome specifically. It just grabbed my attention when people say "software X treats people like they're stupid", and then they want things done for them.
    - bananamerica 2y ago

daghamm 2y ago

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.

jzb 2y ago
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.
- fwn 2y ago
  > 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.

isantop 2y ago

CoC violations — particularly ones egregious enough to warrant removal from a project — often involve topics of a highly sensitive nature regarding events which could potentially reveal the identity of the victim party, which is entirely not appropriate. While I completely understand the frustration around the current lack of communication regarding this incident, it's fully appropriate given the situation at hand and those party to the proceedings are the only ones at liberty to discuss what happened.

ranger_danger 2y ago
Saw this on the thread: > I think that choosing to reveal that it is a code of conduct violation, but then refusing to state why, is less responsible than both being completely transparent, or saying nothing. I worry that it could start unnecessary drama.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Yeah, I saw that too. Not about to get a posting ID there, so I'll say here what I thought there: > I worry that it could start unnecessary drama. What that commenter apparently missed was the worse possibility (or probability), that it will suppress "drama" that would have been necessary.
djfhag 2y ago
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 that cannot be mentioned in order to "protect a fictional aggrieved party". Which is criminal libel.
- em-bee 2y ago
  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?

evasb 2y ago

The problem is that, looking back at GNOME history, we get curious about what really happened. But Sonny is not protesting or something, so we cannot say anything about it.