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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).
Who did this, under what authority? Rather critical information is missing.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Wait, so the Linux foundation is now entirely corporate dominated?
How the hell is that even possible?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Unless Linus is on the board of an Linux related organization it is irrelevant to me. All hail Linus!
oh look, there's proud SJW and perpetual FOSS shitstirrer Mathew Garet making unsubstantiated charges of a conspiracy against a Linux trade organization. All because a parasitical lawyer who's attached herself to OSS organizations to promote her radical feminist agenda (and not free software) won't get to join the trade organization's board of directors (LF is not a charity) so that she try an influence them to donate to a organization whose function now is to sue the members of the industry which is responsible for the spread of Linux globally. Not a single line of worthwhile source code has been released as a result of GPL enforcement lawsuits, but they have generated legal fees, which is what this is pretty much about and her exorbitant salary. Hey Intel, HP, Red Hat, CoreOS, etc., when are you going to purge these enablers who only contribute nothing but toxicity and discord amongst the community?
PS.Since MG likes conspiracy theories maybe he should ask about the curious circumstances surrounding the Gnome Foundation's delayed releasing the its financials statement only after Karen secured her position on SFC. I'm sure the board members would have like to asked a few questions during her interview if they had known about the apparent mismanagement of funds that almost entirely went to supporting Karen's pet project, the OPW.
Obviously this happened because Karen is a woman.
How dare you make that assumption. Karen may self Identify as a hermaphrodite koala for all you know.
For those of you who don't know who that may be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> GPLv3
Well, for one the kernel is GPLv2, so this may relate to the ecosystem, but not the kernel per se. That said, I don't think GPLv3 has in effect made things that much 'worse' than GPLv2 for the parties that dislike the GPL. What we have seen is an increased involvement of companies and lawyers protecting business interest pushing MIT/BSD style licenses. So it's not that GPLv3 has turned people off of GPL, it's that companies are getting their way more and more (which can be its own problem).
> systemd
Note that this is controversial precisely because it's an area that is so core to a system, that it's not really that reasonable to make it an 'optional' thing. Contrast with other controversial things (pulseaudio, networkmanager, dbus) that can be mostly ignored by people turned off by it (though systemd has elevated dbus to a requirement, direct use of dbus by users remains something that can *usually* be avoided.
> GNOME 3
I really wish that 'GNOME 3' would have used a different name. The heritage to Gnome 2 is weak. Use of GNOME name basically is leveraging the familiarity of Gnome 'brand' to de-facto it's way onto the desktop. I would have preferred them to present their 'new concept' as just that, a new concept to be evaluated on it's own merits. Call it a spiritual successor or something, but don't set the expectation that it's the natural evolution of the Gnome 2 experience.
> Wayland
I don't fear wayland much, nor am I disappointed with the slow pace of adoption. I don't think it'd be the end of the world if it supports the common desktop, but the improvements it brings are not of urgent practical need.
> Firefox
I don't think any browser *isn't* converging on the same experience as Chrome provides (Edge, Opera, Firefox, all resemble Chrome). I am unhappy about this, but don't see this as something that can be escaped on any platform.
> use Windows or OSX
Now if any of the above points grate on your sensibilities, Windows takes all of them and makes them worse. If you bemoan the loss of GPLv2, total proprietary isn't going to be better. The browsers are all doing the same stuff. If you don't like systemd or the lack of choice, then Windows services will give you nightmares (added bonus of tendency to lump unrelated services into the same process making it impossible to discern which service is misbehaving performance wise). As of Windows 10, true that Gnome 3 can be avoided, but it can similarly be avoided by going to other desktop environments (MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, KDE, depending), and if you do anything with virtual terminals, Windows will make you cry (mintty as shipped with most recent git is serviceable, but that's as close as it gets). If you don't like Wayland, well Windows display approach looks more like Wayland than X11 (not that it's a bad thing). I don't know about OSX as much (haven't touched it in years).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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)
Those of us whom you've wrongly labeled as "astroturfers" actually tend to be long time users of Linux, both personally and professionally.
Many of us are responsible for managing thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Linux servers or VM instances.
We've also made many critical contributions to open source software.
If you're using any open source software right now, directly or indirectly, you're probably using code written by us.
We're merely venting our frustration as we watch Linux, both the software and the community, fall into disgrace.
Linux and open source software used to be about doing things better than proprietary software.
It used to be about building a solid community where we'd help each other out.
Now the quality of the software has become shitty, and tainted with shitty licenses like the GPLv3.
Now the community has become rotten, having been infiltrated by non-technical folks masquerading as though they can contribute something of value, when they clearly cannot.
Open source software used to be about writing and sharing damn good code. Now it's about social justice, combating various perceived -isms, and everything but writing and sharing good software!
Besides, what the fuck kind of company would pay people to disparage Linux on Slashdot of all places?! This is a dying site, where it's a miracle when a submission gets over just 100 comments! The fall of this site parallels the degradation of Linux and its community.
But if we long time Linux users can get paid for merely expressing our frustration here, let us know how!
You can provide us with the contact details of the people to get in touch with at these "non-Linux companies" you speak of, right?
You weren't just making false allegations, were you? Nah, you couldn't have been. So provide us with the contact details, so we can get paid for expressing our frustration.
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.)
It's the same everywhere.
Also happens in FreeBSD-land: company coughs-up code that solves a problem that is relevant to other users (includes companies that turn "FreeBSD" into a part of their product) - code get's into the source-tree (which review, of course)
I wouldn't even say that's a bad thing. After all, that's how we ended-up with ultra-stable releases recently:
Netflix doesn't want their delivery/cache boxes to crash.
Customers pay top-dollar to EMC so that their Isilon-devices are stable
etc.pp. You just have to put things into perspective.
OSS isn't a hippie love-fest anymore. Hasn't been for a while.
Best thing is to get over it quickly and move on.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin