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).

Comments

Re:Linux is becoming a shitshow, even before this.

[Junta]

I think in aggregate the behavior on laptops has improved out of the box.

What has gotten worse is the ability for someone to figure out and apply a reasonable workaround for an issue they run into.

Re:Linux is becoming a shitshow, even before this.

[postbigbang]

The enemies of FOSS are well-known, although some superficially appear to have changed their tune.

Your frustrations are common to most projects, as they evolve, go through cycles, and wax and wane.

I have no problem with the GPLv3. Other licenses can be more or less permissive. Linux is still just the kernel, and the rest is devil of the details. FreeBSD is a lot of fun, with its cousin. There are a lot of decent projects out there, some with good code, some not.

In the early days of a project, a lot of code is pretty good, and the number of coders, good and bad, has increased meteorically over the years. Some never knew what the actual ancestry of Unix was, let alone the FOSS movement.

I use Linux, but it's not the only thing I use. Like you, I have choices. Some days I'm deep in Debian, other days, in Centos. Otherdays it's MacOS and Windows. On rarer days, FreeBSD and Android and iOS, QNX, and for fun, Raspian.

These are tools, and used for reasons unique to each user. There are those that DO come here and whose gig it IS to say, "hurray for our side" despite slashdot's diminishing numbers. There are old timers here, and a 4000+ response is probably unlikely as social media has caused a lot of diffusion. Maybe they go to Reddit, etc. I don't care. What I see here, however, are decidedly astroturfing warriors that alternately disparage Windows MacOS or Linux to suit the aims of their overlords, rather than voicing cogent chapter and verse about actual problems, rather than anecdotal rumor mongering.

The truly insane seem to have left, as have the goatse crowd, and the other off-their-meds posters. Some days, it's even under R rated. Fine. ACs do what they will, but I watch as various threads get crapped on in a decided tone that doesn't seem to match reality, and so they become suspect. Certain companies are known to hire people that do exactly what I'm describing. You know who they are.