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Comment by fpgeek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Most "right" representatives don't want anything to do with corporate politics, they want to hunker down and write useful code.

That is why the sociopaths and busybodies "rise" to the top of any org, because those that started it all don't want to get involved in that (and will likely just pack up and move on if push comes to shove).

> 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.

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.

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

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).

Allwinner actually signed up as part of an attempt not to be a GPL violator anymore, along with releasing the source to a bunch of their stuff as GPL or LGPL. Thanks to their newly-found interest in compliance I think they may actually be the only company shipping hardware-accelerated MPEG and h.264 decoders that don't require any kind of closed-source code. (Unfortunately, the VP8 decoder is closed still because VP8 isn't copyleft and they can get away with it.)

It's not that I think they'll be motivated by altruism, but they presumably have some commercial skin in the linux game. Enough to get them paying those large foundation membership fees at least.

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