Leah Rowe Coups Libreboot | Hacker News Reader

Leah Rowe Coups Libreboot

71 points_vxzl39 comments

This project is a joke when it comes to professionalism and quality and it is unfairly giving free software a bad image. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was thinking it was going to be an old article about what happened for years ago when this maintainer abruptly withdrew the project from GNU with absolutely zero advance notice to anyone. This is why companies pay millions of dollars for Enterprise Linux or, because of its bad image, don't want to use free software at all.

Open source firmware is a great and necessary idea, but I do not think the Libreboot project, cool as it may be, is ever going to make substantial progress towards that (for non-decade old laptops).

> Open source firmware is a great and necessary idea, but I do not think the Libreboot project, cool as it may be, is ever going to make substantial progress towards that (for non-decade old laptops).

Not only that, but the Coreboot project -- which Libreboot is a fork from -- has been making incremental progress towards open-source firmware. Their firmware still contains some binary blobs, but, unlike Libreboot, it's actually usable on some modern hardware, and they're making progress towards replacing some of those blobs with free substitutes.

Actually, I'm a bit out of the loop - is coreboot a strict superset of libreboot? Can you do a checkout of the coreboot code and do something like `./configure --no-blobs --target=thinkpadx60 && make` for systems that support it and get effectively the same thing that libreboot would have given you?

Not a strict superset, it's more accurate to say libreboot is a restricted and modified (old) subset of coreboot. I don't think coreboot has catered to blob free enthusiasts the same way libreboot has, and I believe the build system is different, so the answer is probably no (?)

Libreboot is one of the several distributions of coreboot. Looks like coreboot only provides the sources but not the compiled binaries.

That title is misleading -- coups makes sense, mostly, but a clearer title would be "Leah R revokes all access to LibreBoot code and infrastructure".

This is concerning to me, though, as I have a laptop with Libreboot, mostly to mess around with firmware and low-level stuff, and I'm now worried that some disgruntled owner would insert, out of malice or oversight, something that would mess things up a bunch.

Does libreboot auto-update now? Back when I played with it, I had to manually apply updates(which I admittedly didn't do).

https://libreboot.org/news/libreboot202104xx.html gives Leah's take on this and includes reasons for removing the code of conduct from the project.

> She acts like a total fascist, going around the internet looking for people that disagree with her political views; she then attempts to cancel those people. > […] > This is why I revoked the code of conduct (Contributor Covenant) on libreboot.org. I do not wish for Libreboot to be associated with her.

That reads to me like the CoC was removed for reasons not related to its content, but related to views of its author.

Isn't removing the CoC because you don't agree with some views or actions of its author cancelling as well?

No, it's like removing buggy code and not remotely related to real cancelling where a human is removed from some project or other position for political views.

This was overdue, but as always in these cases, no one can support Leah publicly. I'm sure there is massive silent support for this move [1]. The Linux kernel should follow, but it is in the hands of developers who are beholden to their corporate masters.

The FSF is the last bastion of true freedom, and I hope RMS will be president again.

[1] I would not be surprised if it had 70% approval if there were a truly and guaranteed anonymous poll of all open source developers.

> I don't have an exact date as my IRC client is not configured to store the date in each timestamp but Leah and I did speak privately after reinstatement and I made it clear that coups were not acceptable and to not engage in that behavior ever again, which she agreed to.

JFC that's just weakness and incompetence. You document this stuff and you don't open yourself up to it again with restrictions no stronger than "I promise".

Well, I trusted Leah and that's what a lot of free software development requires. I was foolish for not discussing restrictions at that point but this is a learning situation for me. What would you have done differently?

I don't know the situation well enough to say what I would have done to fix it. But I definitely would have saved the correspondence, and I definitely would have discussed a "soft demotion" in responsibility and power with the other members.

"Do business as strangers"

More context: https://notabug.org/libreboot/libreboot/commit/27fce189cd1cd...

+news/rms.md

Oh boy.

https://notabug.org/libreboot/libreboot/commit/8a46e9cf46080...

Indeed. Curiously enough I couldn't find the file listed in the commit.

My response: https://libreboot.org/news/resignations.html

I wish [name redacted] all the best. Their work is fully preserved in the Git repository, should they wish to continue it in their own repositories.

Where does this recent-ish (last few years) trend of "coups" and power struggles in open-source software stem from? What is causing this trend in behavior?

The right answer probably would have been to fork and just do her own thing under a different name. That's certainly happened more than a few times in the past, and sometimes the new one ends up being renamed to the old project name once it's clear that's the way forward.

Cleaner, less drama, and you don't break the trust of your former team.

On a side note what was the deal with https://libreboot.org/news/leah-fundraiser.html . This seems kind of unseemly to be fund raising for an elective surgery using your open source project as a platform. Was the fundraiser successful? Is type of thing common among project maintainers?

Leah has a history of making brash decisions but we (the other devs) agreed to posting that single news article. It meant a lot to her so we allowed that post for her sake, but no it is not common amongst project maintainers.

GCS isn't elective surgery.

https://thetranscenter.com/transwomen/gcs/

"The decision to have gender confirmation surgery (GCS) is a very personal, private matter, and not all transwomen will elect to undergo this procedure. It is important to keep in mind that GCS is not a requirement for transition, and many transwomen feel happy and content with their bodies without undergoing GCS."

So yea, its elective.

This seems a little fishy but I might be missing context. According to https://libreboot.org/contrib.html [name redacted] is still listed as a maintainer.

She missed that one, apparently.

If you check out the relevant git repo you can see in the commit log that there's this giant commit message: https://notabug.org/libreboot/libreboot/commit/27fce189cd1cd...

> I, Leah Rowe, have re-taken full control of the Libreboot project after 4 years delay in bringing out a new release. [...] The people working on it kept adding too many new features without fixing fundamental issues. I have revoked all of their access to project infrastructure; Libreboot is now lead by me. I have a completely different idea for how to run the project and what a coreboot distro should be.

- https://libreboot.org/news/libreboot202104xx.html

Thats the context I was missing. Thanks.

Boy, this smells like a drama drop if I've ever seen one. A maintainer of a relatively well known (and relatively stagnated) project decides to take back control in order to start releasing again, and one of the usurped maintainers comes to HN to post a plaintext complaint about it? Either post her commit message or don't post anything at all, framing this through the lens of a "coup" raises more questions than it answers. Ultimately, I feel like this was distastefully handled on both sides.

It links to the Git repo and mentions the commits. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, I’m having difficulty not describing the following as a “coup”:

> I, Leah Rowe, have taken over the Libreboot project.

> I've done this without consulting the other devs

(P.S.: In case it isn’t clear from my tone, though, I am not trying to express an opinion regarding the situation, only that their PoV seems perfectly reasonable.)

I think you cut off that second line a bit too soon.

  > I've done this without consulting the other devs,
  > because there are no other devs right now. None of
  > them are active. They would never accept this change
  > in Libreboot project governance policy, and I have 
  > control over 100% of libreboot.org
  > (I never relinguished [sic] control).

I make no statement about it being appropriate or not. It does at least provide a bit more context about the Author's stated position.

I addressed your concern with the commit message and linked it directly. Honestly, I'm ready to wash my hands of all of this but I'm not willing to roll over, so yeah it is kinda messy but that's the nature of this situation.

Just my two cents. I know passions are high and it’s tempting to see this as a struggle for power but I think that will only worsen the situation honestly. I would disengage completely from this situation and start up your own fork if you wish to continue working on this codebase.

Indeed. It seems like the reasoning was pretty explicit, here's the commit message: https://notabug.org/libreboot/libreboot/commit/27fce189cd1cd...

Honestly, without knowing the project and contributors, I'd be inclined to support a "coup" establishing a new maintainership policy in an otherwise-moribund project. There are good forks and bad forks, and likewise there can be good "coups" which act to restart active development.

Err, sorry. No. Maintainers with copyright holdings and history and otherwise agreed-upon governance do not deserve a "coup", regardless of how [in]active the project is.

There are lots of dead projects in the OSS sphere. Fork it if you have a problem with one of them. Don't plagiarize and rewrite history on the main repositories/projects, though. That's just poor form.

>Fork it if you have a problem with one of them.

Apparently, that seems to be what Leah is doing:

>"I will soon be forking osboot (which itself is a fork of Libreboot 20160907) to create a new Libreboot release."

Then there's no reason for her to be disparaging and erasing the other maintainers. Also, I question what "fork" really means here.

The other maintainers never released anything - they spent four years on a staled rewrite that was going nowhere and blocked any meaningful progress, per her commit. If accurate, I can understand the desire to nuke it.

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