[Tech-board-discuss] [Ksummit-discuss] TAB non-nomination

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Thu, 08 Nov 2018 16:04:02 -0800
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> Several people have asked me to stand again for election to the TAB, so
> I thought I'd give a general explanation of why that isn't going to
> happen.  For background: I was one of the people who lead the charge in
> getting the Linux Foundation predecessor OSDL to create the TAB to give
> developer input into what was then seen as a body trying to speak for
> the Linux Kernel.  I was actually TAB chair for 8 years from 2006 to
> 2014.  The job of the TAB, as I saw it, was to solve a lot of the
> political friction issues around the places where the Linux Kernel
> community interfaces with the Linux Foundation and Industry and in
> those 8 years I gained quite a lot of expertise in political relations
> trying to do that.
> 
> However, TAB member and TAB chair aren't roles people are born to fill,
> they're roles people have to grow into.  What our community needs is
> more people willing to grow into these roles to ensure effective
> succession and if I stepped into one I'd be denying others that
> opportunity, which would be bad both for succession planning and the
> growth of the community in general.
> 
> I think the reason I'm getting these requests is angst over this CoC
> debate, so I'll go so far as to detail my political instincts over this
> below ... if you've no interest in politics (as most of you won't have)
> stop reading now.  If you are interested, perhaps you should consider
> standing for the TAB yourself.
> 
> James

Thank you for your service.

> The biggest political mistake was actually doing anything with the
> Linux Kernel CoC at all.  The object was to deflect a highly
> unfavourable article in the New Yorker.  With hind sight, that could be
> achieved simply by Linus' personal apology, statement that he was
> stepping aside and going for assistance to understand others' emotions.
> 
> Hind sight, though is always perfect.  At the time, as a TAB member,
> all you saw was a panic driven by both Linus and the Linux Foundation
> that we needed an updated Kernel CoC ASAP, like today.  Panic is very
> infectious so it can be extremely difficult in these circumstances to
> stand up and say "stop, we need more information"  ... and if you think
> you'd be the one always to demand more information remember that
> there's a time a decision has to be made and it always passes before
> you can get complete information, so you'd basically be rendering the
> TAB indecisive and useless.  Recognising when it's time to stop and ask
> for more data and when you have to make decisions with what you have is
> a key political skill.

Based on what it looked like from outside the process, this analysis
matches what I observed.


> The second mistake was picking the wrong CoC.  I'm not talking about
> the wording, which has been discussed on this list, but the politics
> surrounding the choice:  The original author of the current CoC was
> unsupportive to the point of attacking the kernel community in public. 
> That drove a huge amount of me too attacks plus an equally large amount
> of anti-me too hysteria and lead to enormous external awareness and
> friction plus a not inconsiderable amount of unwelcome personal email
> to various people.  This could largely have been avoided by either
> evolving our existing CoC through a community process or by picking a
> CoC whose original author would be willing to stand up and be
> supportive of our desire to change.

There is precedent for taking something which did not match
the political alignment of the community (GPL license) and modifying
the interpretation to meet the consensus of the a subset of the
community. I don't think even today that the Linux kernel developers
beliefs around GPL match the purist camp.

> The third mistake was dumping the fully formed CoC and a later update
> into the tree with little to no community input which has generated a
> lot of obvious anger within our community itself. All I'll say on this
> is that revisiting the CoC is going to cause another huge cascade of
> externally driven attacks which I think we'd all rather avoid, so if
> you're still ticked, then perhaps you should channel that anger and
> stand for the TAB ...

This is where I disagree. Without doing something it would have caused
even more attacks.  This kind of messy surgery was necessary to fix
the practice and perception of the kernel developers.

James, I am sorry to see you throw your hands up and give up.
It is has always been valuable to have your considered insight
even if at times we all disagree.