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Linux Foundation Quietly Drops Community Representation (dreamwidth.org)
The Linux Foundation, though it's straightforwardly not a grassroots organization along the lines of the FSF or EFF, has long had a degree of non-corporate involvement by way of community-elected members on its board. Now, writes new submitter Ensign Nemo, that's no longer true. An excerpt from Matthew Garrett's blog on the change:
The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors. Section 3.3(a) now says that no affiliate members may be involved in the election of directors, and section 5.3(d) still permits at-large directors but does not require them[2]. The old version of the bylaws are here - the only non-whitespace differences are in sections 3.3(a) and 5.3(d).
These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September. A short time later, the "Individual membership" program was quietly renamed to the "Individual supporter" program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped (compare the old page to the new one).
These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September. A short time later, the "Individual membership" program was quietly renamed to the "Individual supporter" program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped (compare the old page to the new one).
The Linux Foundation is the group that pays Linus' paycheck (used to be called OSDL). It's funded by IBM, Samsung, Intel, Oracle, Qualcomm, and others. They support other kernel related projects (like Xen Hypervisor and LSB).
Karen Sandler is best known around here for leading Gnome when Gnome started their women/underrepresented outreach program. She is now at the Software Freedom Conservancy (which supports Inkscape, Wine, BusyBox, Samba and others), and she brought her outreach program with her (it's now a part of the SFC).
It is unclear whether the move by the Linux Foundation has anything to do with Karen. The article doesn't clarify, and since there were only six affiliate members who lost representation, hardly anyone is affected by this change.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Linux is also falling off the wagon on laptops. Suspend/hibernate problems, power management issues, WiFi troubles, graphics switching is a pain in the ass.
Wait, so the Linux foundation is now entirely corporate dominated? How the hell is that even possible?
It always was. The Linux Foundation used to be called OSDL. They give Linus a paycheck. You can see the member list here.
By design they don't make any decisions about the Linux kernel: they just got together to fund it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
For those of you who don't know who that may be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Why is this organization even relevant? Which persons involved with the Linux kernel asked for such a foundation, and what was their justification for it?
The Linux Foundation does several things for the community:
1. Pays Linus Torvalds to work on the Linux Kernel. He initially worked for Transmeta, but then when they let him go he was quickly put on the dole by OSDL (now Linux Foundation) in order to help keep him vendor neutral and allow him to focus solely on the Linux Kernel. (While at Transmeta he had some other responsibilities for Transmeta if I'm not mistaken, so most but not all of his time was on the Linux Kernel.)
2. Helps protect the Linux Trademark that Linus officially owns. Linus did not originally trademark the term "Linux"; then someone did and brought a suite against him, so the community (and corporations) stood up, defended it, and then trademarked it, officially giving Linus the ownership. However, Linus is in now way financially capable of defending it against sufficiently funded groups, so having an organization like Linux Foundation help in that respect is very good.
3. Helps show sponsorship of the Linux Kernel. Companies - especially big companies - like to get tax write-offs. By donating to the Linux Foundation (a charity) they get write-offs and they get to build some good will by having their name publicized as a sponsor.
4. Training - Linux Foundation officially does some training, and support. For example, they help companies get into the Kernel Development process, providing access to key developers, and mentoring on how to get contributions accepted. Greg Kroah-Hartman has been quite helpful to a number of companies in that respect; that doesn't mean they get a straight line into having their patches accepted, but that they get mentored on what to do so the patches are *likely* to be accepted - thus more hardware and features are supported by the Linux Kernel.
There's more they do as well, but those are the biggies.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Yes. It should be noted that Sandler is the same SJW that sleazed onto the GNOME board and pushed an open reach programme for women - which SHE was responsible for and SHE oversaw and which all but bankrupted the GNOME foundation when it ran out of control. She then quit two weeks before the GNOME foundation announced the colossal mess.
Something that had nothing whatsoever to do with GNOME technology... syphoned off funds. I never contributed a penny again.
They plan the same thing with the Linux Foundation.
The fact that Garrett "spotted" this is due to him being part of the clique playing these entryism games. Work together to get onto the board of an organisation and then start making accusations and claims to remove people... which then get filled by their political supporters.
Fuck this shit. I'm not defending the changes to weaken community support - but if you want someone to blame: it's these shitbags. If you want your technology to based on merit and not gender politics and SJW whining, then get rid of these people. Make it clear they have no place.
Make merit and skill the reason anyone has sway in Linux... not skin colour and genitals.
It's not that I have any sympathies for commercial exploitation of free open source software, but any foundation is well advised to keep Karen Sandler away from it.
GPL enforcement is crucial across the board and has resulted in plenty of worthwhile code being released. OpenWRT and related firmware are great stuff that is widely used, but as I recall Linksys did not release any code until after they were threatened. These days most companies don't waste time and money fighting it, precisely because they know that it will be fought and they know they will lose.
For that reason, companies often preemptively go in the other direction and try to embrace the FOSS goodwill. Do you think Google would have dared risked shareholder lawsuits with AOSP if no one had ever bothered suing anyone for GPL violations? Do you think it's merely a staggering coincidence that Apple has made no serious effort to open source their BSD-based operating systems? (Their contributions to Darwin definitely fall under "not very serious" category.)
It's either very stupid or very disingenuous to imply that the GPL and GPL enforcement has had nothing to do with Linux's success.
(Donated money being spent on gender-specific outreach programs is another matter entirely, of course.)