https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5899324/gnome-ousts-elected-board-member-in-secret-and-tells-nobody-for-2-months

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5908516/gnome-bans-manjaro-core-team-member-for-uttering-lunduke for a TLDR

backstory: two months ago, a guy named Sony Piers who's an incredibly well respected open source developer was randomly ousted from the GNOME foundation, and they decided not to tell anybody until like 5 days ago.

The GNOME Foundation Board voted to remove Sonny Piers as a member of the Board of Directors for cause, at a Special Meeting on May 17th, 2024, following the procedure outlined in the GNOME Bylaws, and remove him from all committees. Effective May 25th, 2024, his seat is now vacant, and in accordance with the Bylaws will be filled for the remainder of its term by an appointment made by the Board.

A Code of Conduct complaint was also made against Sonny Piers. The Foundation is engaged in a mediation process with him, which is still ongoing and so we are unable to share more information at this time.

Obviously, people were incredibly pissed.

I'm not happy with the lack of communication and transparency from the Board to the wider community, as well as the poor execution for creating an account and posting something completely vague and uninformative. The majority of us are still completely unaware of the internal affairs and conflicts between the Board and Sonny Piers. We don't even know why he was removed, let alone what happened... Code of Conduct complaints are usually not made public at all (for good reason), so I find it even more suspicious that the Code of Conduct complaint against Sonny Piers was made public. In my opinion, mentioning the Code of Conduct complaint was only used to justify removing him, so that the community would support the decision; not to use it as a learning process and enforce the Code of Conduct, i.e. it was done in bad faith.

EBUSSY REPLIES

Hari, I hope you realise[sic] that code of conduct violations never have a public explanation in order to protect all the parties involved—both as a privacy aspect and as a liability one. You will never receive an explanation, unless you are one of the parties involved. Any other reading of this is, at best, naive, and at worst conspiratorial.

Nothing of value is said until the director of the GNOME foundation, Robert McQueen, steps in and makes a statement

I wont bore you with the entire longpost :marseywords: , so heres the juicy part :marseyneat:

We took outside legal advice on the situation and the process at multiple points, and it was duly followed. For the purposes of limiting legal liability, that advice also included making the announcement very terse and factual. I appreciate this is at tension with the transparency that the community would hope to see, but Directors are also obligated to look after the Foundation's legal requirements and financial interests.

LEGAL? :marseypearlclutch: I also want to mention that we still dont know why he was removed from the board, and to be honest, unless there's pending litigation, i don't think we ever will. Sonny posted on his blog later that day and was less than willing to leak why he got booted.

Word starts spreading around the linux community, and ebussy come in to clean it up :marseyjanny:

Okay, since we're seeing this topic brigaded by a bunch of new accounts that have nothing better to do than being edgelords on the Internet, I'm activating slow mode.

PART 2: he who shall not be named

During this shitstorm, a controversial tech blogger named Brian Lunduke wrote a piece about the ousting. Some of you may know him from his yearly "Linux Sucks" talks, others may know him for being a big chud :marseychud: This obviously pisses off the GNOME foundation, which, like most FOSS organizations, is left wing

his reputation precedes him

enter Mark Wagie. Wagie is, ironically, a non-paid GNOME developer. He's the Manjaro Team Core Member, and the GNOME package maintainer for manjaro. During the shit storm, he posted a link to Lunduke's article about the ouster.

One hour later, the post was jannied :marseyjanny: , and he was BANNED :marseychudgenocide:

The maintainer of manjaro gnome (which isn't exactly small) had his account banned just for posting in this thread.

He was banned as far as I can tell for sharing an article from Bryan Lunduke (which is as usual, unnecessarily inflammatory). I think a removal is entirely fair and warranted - I do not have enough information about this person to know if a ban was as I don't have more information than that. I'm not aware of other posts.

ebussy makes a second appereance

Posting naked links to content from Lunduke is an immediate ban on GNOME forums, GitLab, and chat, because there can't be no discussion. We don't control what people who watch that kind of content do on other websites, so they are absolutely free to be terrible elsewhere; we just don't allow them to be terrible here.

There has been no other ban or removal of posts in this topic, even for people questioning the integrity of the board of directors and the code of conduct committee—something that I'd caution about, incidentally.

:surejan:

ebussy and some new user engage in a slap fight, refusing to let either have the last word. (authors note: ebussy is french, therefore he's genetically incapable of letting someone have the last word)

(second authors note: the above was apart of the main thread, until ebussy split it into a new topic. as far as im aware, the original thread is still up and replies are still open :marseythumbsup: )

The moral of the story? just tell people to use KDE.

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IanMurdock deb/ian Days without breaking SSL: 8031 5hr ago #6761000 Edited 5hr ago

The Debian foundation issues the following statement:

We at the Debian foundation value transparency and know the importance of earning your trust. That's why we conduct all of our decision-making processes in the open. For example, when Richard Stallman was reinstated to the Free Software Foundation, the Debian foundation proudly and succinctly announced its position on the issue, and we call on the GNOME community to strive to be almost as good as us by using our process as a guide:

!linuxchads !fosstards