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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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