CoC violations — particularly ones egregious enough to warrant removal from a project — often involve topics of a highly sensitive nature regarding events which could potentially reveal the identity of the victim party, which is entirely not appropriate. While I completely understand the frustration around the current lack of communication regarding this incident, it's fully appropriate given the situation at hand and those party to the proceedings are the only ones at liberty to discuss what happened.
They absolutely do not, certainly not "often". In many cases mediocre corporate developers who have taken over a project demand more deference in purely technical matters (which they do not understand) and remove opposition.
They then close down all communication channels so the real victim (i.e., the person that was removed) cannot tell the truth.
Then they engage in vague accusations that there was some other issue that cannot be mentioned in order to "protect a fictional aggrieved party".
An intentional misreading egregious enough that one can't help wonder which of the murky-dealings-behind-closed-doors-and-vague-unsubstantiated-allegations fans on the Gnome board that removed mr Piers you are.
(If you think that's criminal libel too, then sue me; I'm not that hard to find.)
if the aggrieved party is fictional, then why should the person that was removed not be able to make a statement claiming that the accusations are false?
Exactly. The only thing which might prevent Sonny from explaining the situation is the pending resolutions, which means that no party can comment on the ongoing situation. Realistically we don't know what's going on, and because it's all ongoing it's not actually appropriate for us to know one way or the other. After it's been settled, any party can make a comment, but still none are obliged to (and I'd caution that drawing conclusions based on only one source is inherently biased and unreliable)
Because the communication channels that matter are locked down, and the person who was removed is censored. This has happened in multiple projects (I think Debian was the latest), so all developers associated with project $X think that the foundation members are right and the removed person is wrong.
You can set the record straight on your own website and hope that e.g. a HN submission stays longer than 10 min on the front page. Which would again be prevented by the foundation members who will flag.
I see what you're getting at, but this requires far too much trust in the administrators. Transparency is critical in proceedings like this.
Also, the statement is worded in a way that suggests he was removed for a cause that is unknown, and independently had a CoC violation brought against him that is still being mediated. Therefore there can be no outcome there yet. Which makes me wonder when they removed him for cause, what exactly that cause was.
I think blindly accepting decisions of authority is dangerous.
If you use GNOME, you have inherent trust in that administration as the governing body for the software on your computer. Outside of explicitly checking every line of code and then compiling yourself, there's no way to actually validate what you're truly running on your computer other than that trust.
If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?
> I think that choosing to reveal that it is a code of conduct violation, but then refusing to state why, is less responsible than both being completely transparent, or saying nothing. I worry that it could start unnecessary drama.
> often involve topics of a highly sensitive nature regarding events which could potentially reveal the identity of the victim party, which is entirely not appropriate.
And?
On the other hand, allowing people to be removed "no-questions-asked" and accepting zero transparency is dictatorial.
There's a reason why courts proceedings are usually public: there cannot be justice without transparency. Otherwise it's an easy playbook to avoid accountability.
The fundamental difference here is that this isn't a court of law deciding justice, it's a private organization deciding who is allowed to participate and under what grounds someone should be barred from the same. Transparency in this case extends to making it known that someone is banned from formal participation, who made this decision, and under what grounds the decision was made. We have that in this case; there was a CoC violation, potentially of a sensitive nature, and discretion is therefore warranted.
What reason do we have to trust that it isn't a arbitrary decision concerning petty clashes of personality? We are talking about the organization that hired as its head a literal criminal scam artist.
That like saying that some software that a company throws over the wall every so often is free software. It may be in the literal sense but it misses the point.
Transparency isn't simply knowing that a thing happened. Transparency is knowing why it happened, what steps were taken.
Is this guy a rapist? Transparency means he won't get employed at a women's refuge? Did the foundation make a mistake? Transparency can hold them accountable and make sure the correct fix is made.
And at the risk of sounding like Richard Stallman. Since when did we start treating the gnome foundation as just a 'private organisation'? If anyone knows about the benefits of open collaboration and sharing, it should be them.
Saying anyone was removed "no-questions-asked" is not correct. The board asked many questions over the course of its investigation into the matter. And they just today held an annual general meeting of the entire foundation at which pubic comment or questions were accepted.
And it seems to have had the intended effect: Several people here(1) have been reading it as if that was the "cause".
Weasel wording at its finest.
(1): Including, it seems, poster "isantop". Who is otherwise coming off pretty much as one of those secretive board members, here to defend their decision and procedures, so it's hard to think it's unintentional in their case.
Does free software have academic title IX courts? Even while there may be legit complaints against someone, I'm very suspicious of FOSS governance being abused as a network of star chambers of people with a tremendous amount of influence on the security and privacy of user machines.
A metadata tag and registry of whether FOSS dependencies are governed by a non-profit and the organizations we have exposure to seems like an emerging need.
Indeed, also one needs to investigate if the 503c organizations that claim to be in "the public interest" are really in "the private interest".
Many software foundations serve their directors and the power of a select group of developers, do not fund actual development and largely serve as self-marketing and propaganda groups.
Power wants to avoid accountability, and therefore it avoids transparency wherever possible. No surprise there, and no different from what happens in corporate boards where consensus is established by board members glancing meaningfully at each other, so the agreement doesn't enter the record.
I've long observed the governing bodies of GNOME, Mozilla, and Wikimedia (whose composition doesn't reflect the composition of the community, to put it mildly) to act like mediocre corporate boards, and I'm sure the same power structures and patterns of behavior can be found in other large open source projects.
The code of conduct consists of individual provisions, articles, and paragraphs. It should be easy (in fact, it should be a prerequisite for such actions being taken) to cite the specific provisions of the CoC that were supposedly violated, and to enter that information into the record. That this didn't happen speaks volumes.
1. Grant of License
Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, the licensor hereby grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute the work, provided that you adhere to the Code of Conduct detailed in Section 2.
2. Code of Conduct
All users of the licensed work must:
Treat others with respect, fairness, and dignity.
Not engage in harassment, discrimination, or any form of abusive behavior.
Foster an inclusive and welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds.
Respect the intellectual property rights of others.
Refrain from using the licensed work for any unlawful or unethical purposes.
3. Termination
This license is automatically terminated if you fail to comply with the Code of Conduct in Section 2. Upon termination, you must:
Cease all use, reproduction, modification, and distribution of the licensed work.
Destroy any copies of the licensed work in your possession.
On the contrary. I hadn’t used gnome since 2017, and back then it was absolute junk. Upon installing NixOS two weeks ago, I went with the default desktop environment for while, and this was gnome. I thought at first that NixOS had tweaked gnome into being nice, but my colleague assured me that this is how gbome is today.
More mimalistic, drawing inspiration from macOS.
I still have to remove stuff rather than add stuff to get to where I want. But it wasn’t the first thing I removed on a new install.
I'm going to posit that unless you've used GNOME, KDE, etc. on more than one distribution, it's potentially unfair to judge the DE based on that singular experience.
I've had very different experiences with various desktops depending on which distribution they are on. Ubuntu tends to customize GNOME more than Fedora, so it's possible that what you didn't like was more to do with Ubuntu than GNOME. (Not dissing Ubuntu here - I tested 24.04 recently and it was fine. I actually liked some of their customizations.)
I was forced into ubuntu in that job, so whatever Canonical was shipping was effectively GNOME to me.
Also i looked into dealing with that "flavour" of gnome and the settings availability was just poor. Even XFCE which is a way smaller project does have more and better settings.
And let's not even pull KDE into the discussion, KDE has literally TONS of options.
By that definition virtually nobody uses Windows. Shipping gnome with extensions doesn't make it not Gnome. It is in fact the only Gnome that the majority of users have used given the relative popularity of Ubuntu vs Fedora.
While I agree that the GNOME Foundation is a private organization that, in practice, has the right to decide who is allowed to participate without talking about that process publicly, that doesn't mean that should be exempted from negative consequences to their collective reputation for exercising that right in a way that makes it appear that they are not a transparent organization and operate as a kind of star chamber internally.
Not only does it go against long-established principles and ideals of our society in a lot of ways, to the point that I think even many proprietary software developers would be somewhat uncomfortable with decisions about justice and punishment taking place behind closed doors (even if they're fine with source code being closed), but it goes against the spirit of open source, which is rooted as a concept in the notion that transparency is good and opacity is harmful.
I am concerned that the idea that victims should have their identities kept private to protect them from harassment is increasingly used as an excuse to punish people suspected of wrongdoing in private proceedings and not disclose much if anything about the evidence or the nature of the proceedings, and instead demanding that the public trust authority figures behind closed doors. That is, transparency and openness seem to be vanishing from society in general, in favor of an emphasis on security and a victim's right to privacy, which means we're back to a system where most proceedings take place behind closed doors. Sure, official legal proceedings might still be open, but almost everything of importance these days happens within the domain of very large private organizations and their regulations, meaning that their internal processes affect us almost as much as laws do in some cases.
I worry not only for the future of GNOME, but also for the future of open source and open societies based on the principles of transparency in general. It's possible that the Internet making everything so connected and causing information to flow so rapidly has made it so that it is too dangerous to be open, and thus freedom and transparency are ultimately being killed by the combination of technology and private ownership favoring authoritarian approaches and unilateral, backroom decision making.
The minutes for this meeting is not public yet, but in general gnome foundation minutes are extremly vague on all subjects (e.g. "a change was proposed and the board approved it").
Code of conduct issues seem to bring out certain people out of the woodwork. hence to avoid conspiracy theories and witch hunts taking over I think the foundation should explain the situation as soon as possible.
Terse minutes are pretty common across the board (um, no pun intended there). Unless the meeting happens in a chat fora, it's usually a very brief summary. Doubly so when it's a personnel matter because the less said the better.
> Doubly so when it's a personnel matter because the less said the better.
I think it depends. There's probably a whole lot of reasons to select a specific communication strategy around an incident.
If it's an obvious violation of coc, transparency is probably very well received. For example, if you have someone who's allegedly embezzling funds, just announce the investigation, and follow up one way or another.
If it's a bogus claim, you better not be transparent about it. Because with transparency you're creating evidence against yourself, and that's not smart.
Ah, the good old gnome drama. They consider users , stupid and make their system as stupid as possible and never let the user to do advance customization as they please. Their gate keeping nature back fired I guess.
In their defense, users are stupid and that's why Linux and FreeBSD haven't yet replaced Windows. I recommend GNOME to inexperienced users, and they actually like it and find it intuitive. It accelerates Linux and FreeBSD adoption, which automatically improves the entire freedesktop ecosystem, nobody can deny that. No matter what drama happens, at the end of the day, almost all our distros can run the same apps natively, making every improvement for one a direct or indirect improvement for all.
Have you actually used vanilla Gnome? I did it fairly recently. Gnome 46 is like a fridge. It has fewer graphically exposed settings than Windows 95. I literally had to install a program to scale my wallpaper. It's absolutely ridiculous.
I understand this is a forum for programmers, but it's unrealistic to expect real users to manipulate a program like that by rewriting its source code, or even through dconf.
> It just grabbed my attention when people say "software X treats people like they're stupid", and then they want things done for them.
It's a childish argumentation though. As a former GNOME user, the most infuriating things is that stuff was there (already developed) and was working fine, and got removed or dumbed down so much it made GNOME unusable.
It's not about wanting stuff done for me, it's about fine software being actively, purposedly made worse.
If you wanna be relevant to the conversation you're gonna have to clarify for me: are you in the camp that thinks Gnome treats its users like they're stupid, or not?
I am firmly in the camp where I am not answering this question only to satisfy an irrelevant need to take things literally while ignoring the actual issue being discussed.
>A bunch of nerds with no social competence who make up their imaginary "committees" and give themselves "director" titles prepare for another public shaming and mobbing.
Have you seen the GNOME Foundation? At least the staff is mostly as far away from Nerd as you can be, it contains HR people, that is far, far worse than Nerds, when it comes to backstabbing and rumours.
(I don't know why GNOME has around a dozen (full-time?) employees, managing the project. What are they even doing? Just internal politics?)
Now I don't know what the parent said, but if you mean frightening as in taking up people's time, worry not, as commonly in small orgs such meetings don't take place in reality even though the minutes might indicate so. These minutes may be signed by the attendees via email (or mail) without ever meeting up in reality.
This is very common for small orgs where communication is already daily or the matter is trivial in the first place. The reason minutes are signed at all in such cases is to have a paper trail of the decisions and a date for the meeting held, as that might be a legal requirement.
As an example in our company when approving accounts, all of us have already seen the accounts multiple times. We have been there when the accounts were being made. The minutes of the meeting are more like a formal paper stating that we know what the accounts contain and approve their content, but it's not like we usually schedule an actual meeting just to waste each other's time.
Of course if there's say disagreement with the matter amongst attendees, it is essential to hold a proper meeting.
You seem to have missed the point of the comment you replied to rather entirely.
What was "simultaneous[ly] hilarious and frightening" was that the "minutes" on the linked page said absolutely nothing about what was actually decided (and how) at that meeting. It's all just formalities about "not[ing] the presence of a quorum" and how the "agenda was approved"...
But the actual business of the meeting -- "one resolution was approved, and one resolution was approved unanimously as amended" -- all happened in an "executive session", so you can't even see WHAT those resolutions were.
They could just as well not have published any minutes at all, and we'd know just as much as we do with them. That is simultaneously hilarious and frightening.
