
Linux Foundation quietly drops community representation - logic
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39546.html
======
theGimp
Wow. Thanks for noticing and bringing this to our attention, Matthew.

I, for one, am ready to drop my membership and stop supporting the foundation.
Not that they care. A single platinum sponsor is worth 5,000 individual
"supporters" to them, but it's a matter of principle -- it's a withdrawal of
endorsement.

What options do we have to give the community a voice as far as Linux
governance goes?

~~~
mlinksva
You might switch your support to
[http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/](http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/)
(the other organization mentioned in the article, and a charity rather than a
trade association).

~~~
JoshTriplett
Seconded. They currently have a company matching donations through the end of
the month, so now would be the perfect time to donate.

------
rogerbinns
I happened to be on the page for GPL violations by AllWinner today. That page
also mentions AllWinner recently joining the Linux Foundation, and how their
violations are getting worse! [http://linux-
sunxi.org/GPL_Violations](http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations)

~~~
braiser
Allwinner used to distribute "SDKs" which was their Linux kernel with binary
modules for components that they could not open-source. Allwinner is a fabless
semiconductor company and they source components from different vendors. They
did not know that they had to split the Linux kernel source tarball from those
binary modules! That wiki page is not constructive.

~~~
nona
Doesn't matter whether they are fabless, or what they knew and when. They
distribute GPL'ed software, they're on the hook, and they need to abide by the
rules.

And after all this time and all the warnings they've received, it's not
possible they're not aware of their obligations; they just choose to ignore it
until the day someone actually sues them.

------
makomk
Ah. From reading the comments, the would-be community representative Karen
Sandler is the former Gnome Foundation executive director who caused them to
run out of money by running outreach programs for women on behalf of far
bigger organisations like Google and Mozilla, charging them less for admin
than the actual costs incurred, and agreeing to pay participants upfront and
get paid back later until it completely depleted the Gnome Foundation's
financial reserves. As a result they could no longer fulfil their role of
supporting Gnome development, had to go begging for more money, and Gnome
developers who were expecting to have their costs paid for attending Gnome
events got paid months late because they had to prioritize the non-Gnome
payments. (I believe this also screwed over women who were involved in Gnome
too.)

Of course, mjg59 is a pretty loudly outspoken feminist activist, so I guess
he's hardly going to object to all that.

~~~
fpgeek
I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether or not Karen Sandler would
be a good or bad community representative for the Linux Foundation.

That being said, if the problem is that she would be a bad representative, the
appropriate solution is for someone better to run against her and win the
election. Eliminating the position suggests that the Linux Foundation doesn't
trust the community to pick the "right" representative... and that says a lot
about the situation.

~~~
lmm
> Eliminating the position suggests that the Linux Foundation doesn't trust
> the community to pick the "right" representative... and that says a lot
> about the situation.

The idea that the linux community is dysfunctional and would elect a
representative who wanted to push a particular political agenda at the expense
of linux itself is sadly none too implausible.

~~~
baghira
On the other hand we should expect nothing but good things from esteemed GPL
violators such as Allwinner and WMWare, right? /s EDIT: I guess I should
qualify the statement wrt WMWare as "supposed violator", since the case isn't
over and I haven't looked at the source code.

~~~
oldmanjay
Was this intended to be a rebuttal? It's really just an unrelated tangent
phrased in an misleading way.

~~~
baghira
It is a rebuttal to the implication that the possibility of the community
electing some nefarious personality should be considered valid ground for
denying said community any representation. By the same token a bunch of
corporations should be denied one. I didn't interpret the post as call for
reformed governance, unless you consider

1\. Deny individual representation

2\. ???

3\. Governance problems fixed!

a plan (yeah, I'm being snarky, sorry).

------
vezzy-fnord
Has anyone ever believed the Linux Foundation to be anything besides an ad-hoc
promotional vehicle targeted by and toward large players?

Rob Landley sums it up well:
[http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#18-07-2010](http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#18-07-2010)

~~~
rwmj
Not really disagreeing with you or the link you posted. But I will just say
that LF organize many important Linux conferences[1]. I know from experience
many years ago that organizing conferences is difficult, tedious, time-
consuming and incredibly expensive. The LF conferences that I have been to
have been very well run.

[1] [http://events.linuxfoundation.org/](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/)

------
jwildeboer
One (now supposedly former?) individual member from the Linux Foundation
received a message from Paypal(!) indicating that the Linux Foundation is not
going to take his membership fee any longer. No further explanation given, no
communication from the Linux Foundation.

"Dear <name redacted>,

The Linux Foundation canceled your automatic payments. This means we'll no
longer automatically draw money from your account to pay the merchant.

If you have any questions, you may ask The Linux Foundation about this
cancellation."

~~~
jrgifford
[http://d.pr/i/1aKJp/2k5zsOoc](http://d.pr/i/1aKJp/2k5zsOoc)

I got it too.

------
dvndvn
Please forgive my ignorance. But does this corporate meddling in governance
structure have anything to do with their recent corporations
sponsored/bankrolled initiative "Designing Block chain for transactions".
Which obviously calls for weeding out trouble making general public.

~~~
sanswork
Are you confusing the Linux foundation with the Bitcoin foundation?

~~~
kalleboo
Nope - [http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-
media/announcements/2015...](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-
media/announcements/2015/12/linux-foundation-unites-industry-leaders-advance-
blockchain)

~~~
sanswork
Missed that. Thanks for the info.

------
emmelaich
I don't care what they do, but I don't want them calling themselves the Linux
Foundation and I don't want them owning linux.com

------
duncan_bayne
I've emailed the Foundation to ask them for the reasons for the change. I'll
post any replies I get here.

------
effenponderousa
They clearly have a for-profit mission. Linux _means_ community, yet they have
no community representation. Therefore, the foundation name is misleading.

"The IT Chamber of Commerce", however, isn't a misleading name.

------
pcx
LF is corporate entity, but I always liked and supported it. I think I will
drop my support for them if this is what it seems like it is. I want to wait
till I hear LF's response to these claims.

------
Animats
First the Wikimedia Foundation, now the Linux Foundation. "Membership" in a
nonprofit is now about as meaningless as being an "AOL Member" was.

~~~
throwaway7767
The linux foundation is not a non-profit.

But I'm curious about your statement about the wikimedia foundation, is their
board not elected by general members?

~~~
CRConrad
throwaway7767 wrote: "The linux foundation is not a non-profit."

As late as a month ago, it claimed to be: "SAN FRANCISCO, December 17, 2015
-The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation
through open source..." (from the Block-chain page linked above,
[http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-
media/announcements/2015...](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-
media/announcements/2015/12/linux-foundation-unites-industry-leaders-advance-
blockchain) )

~~~
throwaway7767
I stand corrected regarding the linux foundation, I was under the impression
they were a company and not a non-profit. Thanks for the info.

~~~
ghaff
They're a 501(c)(6) trade association if you want to be technically correct.
Which is different from 501(c)(3)'s which are what you normally think of as
"non-profits" but it's still an exempt organization like a chamber of
commerce.

Fun fact: The NFL was a 501(c)(6) organization at one point because
"professional football leagues" were specifically named in the IRS code but
they voluntarily dropped their status.

------
rndmind
I don't think I know what the "linux foundation" is . . and I've used linux
for 7 years.

~~~
hga
Note who is the current employer of this obscure hacker:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)

~~~
rndmind
Your point is taken. At any rate, I am nonplussed about this story.

------
sqldba
Terrible. I was about to make a donation because I read that other article
saying they fund NTP and other critical free software projects.

~~~
jlgaddis
If you were planning to donate because of NTP specifically, are you aware of
the Network Time Foundation [0] that supports both the NTP Project (the
original reference implementation), the Ntimed Project (phk's rewrite), and
other related projects?

[0]:
[http://www.networktimefoundation.org](http://www.networktimefoundation.org)

------
linuxkerneldev
How many of the "leadership" / "management", ie: the people raking the profits
from this organization are coders?
[http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/leadership](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/leadership)

~~~
scandinavian
Mike Woster - graduated cum laude with a B.S. in Computer Science and Honors
Engineering from Texas A&M University

Steve Westmorelander - He received his B.S in computer science from Louisiana
Tech University. Westmoreland is based in Portland, Ore.

Dan Cauchy - Dan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (with a
Computer Engineering major)

Dan Kohn - Dan received a bachelor's degree in Economics and Computer Science
from the Honors program of Swarthmore College

And all the fellows:

Linus Greg Kroah-Hartman Till Kamppeter Richard Purdie Janina Sajka

Weird question, don't see why the management have to be coders. They work for
the foundation. The foundations pay plenty of the kernel developers.

~~~
linuxkerneldev
> The foundations pay plenty of the kernel developers.

Do you mean directly? How many do they pay?

~~~
linuxkerneldev
Full disclosure, I've never asked LF to pay me for my contributions, nor have
they offered. None of the people I know who are lk contributors who I've just
asked have gotten anything from LF. They have been solicited to pay to attend
LF organized conferences.

~~~
geofft
They don't pay contributors in a Patreon- or tip4commit-style scheme; they
_employ_ certain core developers. If you are not a subsystem maintainer /
lieutenant, you're not going to get a job offer from them. (And even if you
are you shouldn't _expect_ one.)

------
daveheq
Is one person with $5000 more valuable than 5000 people with $1? If you're a
person without $5000, no; if you're a foundation, apparently.

------
chinathrow
Reads like a well planned, step-by-step executed (hostile?) takeover of the
full power over the board.

Why am I not suprised?

------
oneJob
Can someone else please write up a substantial comment so that the top comment
is not a bigoted feminist bashing, logical fallacy ridden comment. It's
embarrassing.

------
AstroJetson
People have asked for years, when will Linux be a real OS, when it gets on the
desktop?

No, when it part of underhanded dealings by large multi-national corporations.
So Linux has finally arrived! Sorry to see it was the Linux Foundation, I've
always had high hopes for them.

~~~
myztic
I don't know where to begin.

0) Linux is just a kernel, so if taken literally, it never will be an OS. But
I will roll with your terminology for now.

1) Linux was a Unix-like OS for tinkerers, programmers and soon for servers. A
"real OS" is not defined by its availability on the Desktop. And indeed I very
much used it exactly because of this, because I am a tinkerer who rather runs
a Server OS on his private machines, that also allows him to do most Desktop-
tasks with ease.

2) The voice of the Desktop camp inside of Linux is not ignored, if anything,
the influence is too big. Think about systemd for example. This was not a move
in order to run better on Servers, this was primarily Notebook and Server
focused. The year of the Linux Desktop is not something we won't see because
of evil big corporations, rather because it simply is not Linux's DNA to be
that.

(And side note: Because of systemd I see more and more people using *BSDs)

~~~
notalaser
To be fair, notebooks and desktops ran fine without systemd for a long time.
To this day, I'm convinced systemd got there just to give Red Hat a big enough
foot in the door.

Systemd _is_ useful on servers, especially for the DevOps people. On a
desktop, it solves no problem that cannot be -- and that has not been _for
years_ \-- solved without it.

I don't use it enough to question its technical merits. The fact that it was
packaged in Debian and the world hasn't fallen over implies that people may be
unhappy with it, but can still do their jobs, which would mean it's not _that_
bad. But the necessity of its existence on notebooks and desktops is
questionable at best.

Edit: I know this is going to incite a lot of posts about how the times have
changed and now storage devices aren't statical anymore and we NEED systemd.
From a lot of people who are too young (or too recent Linux users) to remember
the days when udev was still news.

Guys, we've been _easily_ hotplugging devices on Linux, on USB, SATA and PCI
for about half a decade before systemd's first release (and not as easily but
reliably, nonetheless, for at least seven or eight). We've been reliably
booting and using Linux off a combination of USB and NFS filesystems for even
more than that. All that yadda yadda about devices coming and going at
boottime is not without its technical merits, but unless you boot your
computer with its case open while frantically plugging and unplugging SATA
drives, trust me, it's of absolutely no consequence.

Devices appearing and disappearing dynamically used to be a problem. In 2.4.
Do you remember the 2.4 kernel? That was (boy, does time pass...) more than
ten years ago. Do you _honestly_ think the smart people writing Linux sat on
their thumbs for ten years while the arcane world of tape drives and 10 MB
hard drives around them was giving way to this new world of magic SSDs and
USB?

~~~
lmm
The evil part is that it's making it harder and harder to use a lot of OSS
projects on non-Linux OSes. As a FreeBSD user I'm worried, and when it comes
to Debian/kFreeBSD the world really has ended as far as I can tell ( and just
when it was starting to look like a first-class architecture :'( ).

The conspiracy theory would be that it's a deliberate RedHat effort to cripple
competitors like Solaris. Unfortunately \\*BSD and freedom will be caught in
the crossfire.

~~~
toyg
A RedHat ploy may be, but certainly not to fight _Solaris_ of all systems. Not
even Oracle believes in Solaris (they are pushing Linux everywhere, and their
own devs always target Linux first), and its community is basically as big as
AmigaOS.

Systemd is just the end result of RedHat employing a dominant share of
infrastructure-critical Linux developers and making too much money compared to
other players.

~~~
digi_owl
Well Oracle now have their own Linux distro, forked from RHEL6 (iirc).

This fork seems to have put RH on a war path, as their subsequent releases no
longer separated out kernel patches from the main kernel source etc.

And now CentOS is part of the RH flock, where before it was an independent
repack of RHEL.

And while Solaris itself may be "dead", there are still various tech that came
out of its development that is of interest in the -nix world.

Just look at the continued lamentations that you can't get ZFS support in
Linux because of incompatible licenses.

~~~
throwaway7767
Was it really a fork? I was under the impression that they were just directly
rebuilding the RH packages, and maybe adding a couple of new ones. Like
CentOS, but it's another company doing it and profiting by free-riding on
RedHat's work.

I can understand RedHat being pissed about that.

~~~
toyg
They do fork the kernel and add their own packages for some stuff but yeah,
90% of userland is just recompiled RedHat.

------
myztic
I am sorry that I have to say this, but large parts of the GNU/Linux community
are just irrational idealists hard to work with. Read the GPLv3, it's a great
political document, and somewhere in there there also is a software license,
hidden between the lines.

Linus always said: He cares about the code back and otherwise not what vendors
do with it. He is not in any sense one of those GNU-people about Software
Freedom everywhere and for all. When the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
created the GPLv3, indeed during the process, Linus already spoke out against
it and said he would never ever use it[1]. He cited reasonable use-cases for
which vendors have no other way than to not to give open access to devices, in
part for example commercial license agreements.

The GPLv3 - from the perspective of the FSF - fixes some vital flaws in GPLv2,
from Linus' perspective however is just too strict, forbids use-cases Linux
has been used before previously and is extremely anti-business and would hurt
the Linux project.

Whether this step of the Linux foundation is right or not, can't say for sure,
but I totally understand it. A political anti-business pro-freedom-everywhere
radical who already is involved in suing some of the companies she is supposed
to work with on that said board? Sounds like a headache you would want to
avoid at all costs.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU)

~~~
bcg1
Linus is not a god, and his proclamations are not gospel.

He can crow all he likes about how he wishes he never used the GPL and how he
is not political... but the truth is, no one knows what would have happened if
he didn't use the GNU license or distribute GNU software. Its theoretically
possible that his project would have died on the vine without members of the
community who cared about those things and made considerable contributions.
Nobody knows, not even Linus.

~~~
myztic
Linux would have never been as successful if someone like rms would have
called the shots. People still tinker with the GNU Hurd microkernel and it's
less usable than Minix. Linus is also no god for me, but he is delightfully
pragmatic, someone companies can work with, not against.

~~~
e12e
This explains the failure of gcc, glibc and gnu utils/userland to completely
fail to gain traction too! /sarcasm

(Although the egcc split was painful, and at long last there are some viable
alternatives - it took _decades_ for them to rise up. So it's a little odd
that the FSF/RMS would never have successfully been able to develop a project?
Obviously the need for a (new) GPL licensed [kernel] is less when there
_exists_ a decent GPL licensed kernel (Linux)).

~~~
chris_wot
gcc is already beginning to lose traction to llvm.

~~~
e12e
My point was that "already", means "it took a long time". See also: embedded
development.

