[Ambassadors] Leaving the project

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 05/22/2014 01:52 AM, Onyeibo Oku wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 14:32 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>> On 05/20/2014 06:39 PM, Onyeibo Oku wrote:
>>> I still don't understand why people dump a summary of their grievances
>>> on the ambassador list and walk away, then leave members -- who never
>>> heard the a tiny-bit of their debates -- to wonder what went wrong.
>> One of the underlying reasons of my departure realization of the false
>> image the project has been projecting to the outside world and to the
>> individuals participating in it where amongst other things the project
>> is said to be free while infact it is being systematically oppressed by
>> it's sponsor Red Hat and communities contributed being discarded and or
>> put to disadvantage if they aren't in the direction or the benefit of
>> Red Hat.
> I followed the link [1] in your text.  The statements that aggravate you
> there appear distasteful when read in isolation.  I perused quite a lot
> of the responses that followed and found valid points from both sides.
> Some of the responses from Red Hat employees didn't come across as
> "oppressive" ... I found some RH people arguing in favour of the
> community.  Those are people too.  This is a dilemma that needs to be
> resolved with patience.

For the first this is just one example of many of the corporate noose 
Red Hat has wrapped around the community  and by my observation and 
interaction all those years you can split Red Hat employees within the 
project into three categories

Red Hat employees that are participating on their own accord and on 
their own time
Red Hat employees that are doing this as a part of their job description 
and because they want to as in they are interested in Fedora and it's 
community
Red Hat employees that are doing this as a part of their job description 
and not because they want to but have to but otherwise have no interest 
in Fedora

You got teams within Red Hat that know how to engage with communities ( 
ARM ) and you've got teams within Red Hat that do not ( Red Hat Gnome 
Desktop Team )
You got people within Red Hat living it's HQ ivory tower that like to 
invent sub-community leadership positions then dump people outside the 
community into those position and then you have people within Red Hat 
that actually spot where in the community assistance is needed and is 
valuable and pick people from within the community to work on it full 
time to strengthen that part of the community.

Then you have all the little RH internal empires fighting themselves 
which spreads like infections decease into the Fedora project with each 
of our own governing structure design to supporting those tiny little 
internal empires to continue that power struggle while the project is 
being shaped into the next RHEL version.

All of these are Red Hat's management problems so no matter how much 
patience you wish for, this dilemma is an dilemma we aren't allowed to 
solve ( we could easily solve it ).

Trust me I know I've been fighting hard with several those Red Hatters, 
trying to move our community to sustainable environment for the most 
part of the time I have spent with the project.


>
>> I can give you several historic reference to that oppression or simply
>> others can chime in like Christoph but here you can see that oppression
>> taking place in it's purest form [1] so things that I once thought where
>> within my power to change are not and those things will never change and
>> they are most certainly not changing with this alleged new direction
>> taking place.
> That's what most people thought about the Gnome Project after the
> emergence of Gnome-3. "Hey! those gnomes are lording their stupid DE
> over us.  They wouldn't accept a freaking advise or change any of their
> concepts"  Well, over the years, they've changed and adapted to the
> community outcry.  They are still adapting.  I still see rants on the
> gnome lists but there's always on form of change/progress at the end.
> The evolving concepts and the reactions to them are all good.  I think
> the Spin/Fedora.NEXT scenario is similar.  Eventually, there's going to
> be a common ground.

Oh please the Gnome has been in beta state since it got introduced into 
Red Hat Linux 5.0 and it will never change due to how they have been and 
are doing their upstream developments.

They always have been and always will be getting the little things wrong 
for people using Gnome with this throwing over the wall mentality which 
does not work for Desktop development.

>   
>> I devoted 8+ years of my free time to the project and made sacrifices
>> along the way more then most people would do for the project because I
>> was under the illusion of what it stood for even after I got warned by
>> good and valuable community contributors like the members of the Fedora
>> unity, who they themselves had been bitten by the same mistakes. An
>> history of the project that our benevolent dictators want to bury in the
>> past so the can continue to exploit the community for their own gain.
>>
> "benevolent dictators" ... *cough*, you mean a company trying to protect
> its investments?  I wouldn't put it that way.  On the other hand, 8+
> years of passionate contributions is something. My reaction would be to
> protect that investment until its obvious that I have failed.  From what
> I read on that list, I would wait a little longer to see how this ends.

That's you I was going to stubborn my way through their idiocy until 
atleast I manage to finish the systemd integration into the distribution 
since I'm not content following this utterly broken feature process 
where things get flagged 100% without being remotely finished and have 
been swimming against that Red current for quite sometime but now the 
direction of that current is going down the drain so it's time for me to 
swim ashore so I wont go down with it.

The fact is whether you like it or not Red Hat is oppressing the 
community under the false impression of "sponsorship" to get people do 
their work for them.

You might be thinking the board exist there to protect and serve the 
community from this kind of corporal abuse like I did but the majority 
of the board is on Red Hat's payroll with those that are not currently 
trying to defend our foundation from the constant attacks from our 
oppressor under the banners of .next and wg  + the board works in so 
mysterious way that they themselves dont know half the time what they 
are doing and there have not been held board meetings for quite sometime 
now probably because they lost sight of each other in all that mystery.

JBG