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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

Ah. From reading the comments, the would-be community representative Karen Sandler is the former Gnome Foundation executive director who caused them to run out of money by running outreach programs for women on behalf of far bigger organisations like Google and Mozilla, charging them less for admin than the actual costs incurred, and agreeing to pay participants upfront and get paid back later until it completely depleted the Gnome Foundation's financial reserves. As a result they could no longer fulfil their role of supporting Gnome development, had to go begging for more money, and Gnome developers who were expecting to have their costs paid for attending Gnome events got paid months late because they had to prioritize the non-Gnome payments. (I believe this also screwed over women who were involved in Gnome too.)

Of course, mjg59 is a pretty loudly outspoken feminist activist, so I guess he's hardly going to object to all that.

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I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether or not Karen Sandler would be a good or bad community representative for the Linux Foundation.

That being said, if the problem is that she would be a bad representative, the appropriate solution is for someone better to run against her and win the election. Eliminating the position suggests that the Linux Foundation doesn't trust the community to pick the "right" representative... and that says a lot about the situation.

> Eliminating the position suggests that the Linux Foundation doesn't trust the community to pick the "right" representative... and that says a lot about the situation.

The idea that the linux community is dysfunctional and would elect a representative who wanted to push a particular political agenda at the expense of linux itself is sadly none too implausible.

On the other hand we should expect nothing but good things from esteemed GPL violators such as Allwinner and WMWare, right? /s EDIT: I guess I should qualify the statement wrt WMWare as "supposed violator", since the case isn't over and I haven't looked at the source code.

Was this intended to be a rebuttal? It's really just an unrelated tangent phrased in an misleading way.

It is a rebuttal to the implication that the possibility of the community electing some nefarious personality should be considered valid ground for denying said community any representation. By the same token a bunch of corporations should be denied one. I didn't interpret the post as call for reformed governance, unless you consider

1. Deny individual representation

2. ???

3. Governance problems fixed!

a plan (yeah, I'm being snarky, sorry).

Allwinner actually signed up as part of an attempt not to be a GPL violator anymore, along with releasing the source to a bunch of their stuff as GPL or LGPL. Thanks to their newly-found interest in compliance I think they may actually be the only company shipping hardware-accelerated MPEG and h.264 decoders that don't require any kind of closed-source code. (Unfortunately, the VP8 decoder is closed still because VP8 isn't copyleft and they can get away with it.)

It's not that I think they'll be motivated by altruism, but they presumably have some commercial skin in the linux game. Enough to get them paying those large foundation membership fees at least.

Most "right" representatives don't want anything to do with corporate politics, they want to hunker down and write useful code.

That is why the sociopaths and busybodies "rise" to the top of any org, because those that started it all don't want to get involved in that (and will likely just pack up and move on if push comes to shove).

> Karen Sandler is the former Gnome Foundation executive director who caused them to run out of money

For an in-depth argument from a Gnome board member on why this is a completely false accusation, see here: http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2015/09/13/outrageous-outreach/

Errm, that's almost exactly the same as what I said, he's just spinning it differently to make it look like a minor issue and omitting certain facts, like the fact that the cash shortage he downplays as a "purely a business accounting issue" meant that they had to freeze promised reimbursements to Gnome developers for expenses they'd already incurred to attend Gnome development events because they no longer had enough cash in their bank account to pay them and still cover admin costs. This is mentioned in the mailing list announcement: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.general...

(To be clear, I don't think their liabilities were ever in danger of exceeding their assets, but you can't pay wages and bills with a promise from Google to pay you money at some unspecified point in the future once it winds through their accounting process. I believe there was even some risk that they might not have enough money for the admin expenses involved in invoicing companies for OPW and chasing them up. Cashflow is never some minor accounting detail - screwing it up kills companies.)

Without knowing a thing about the case, just by reading your posts and the linked rebuttal:

No, that doesn't seem to be the same. The mailing list explicitly states what the rebuttal claims as well: They were bad at collecting money for a time.

The mailing list _doesn't_ state that the director was in any way responsible. Your words were "the former Gnome Foundation executive director who caused them to run out of money". The reponse to your post linked to a statement that claimed that this isn't true and your link doesn't support that argument either.

I'd say that this ("She is the reason/she caused the foundation to run out of money", directly implying a personal responsibility) is a very big difference between these two stories. You might be correct - I wouldn't know. But again: I wouldn't consider these two statements (exactly or even remotely) the same.

She was the Gnome Foundation head honcho and co-lead of the Outreach Project for Women (the other co-lead was apparently from Red Hat, not Gnome) during the time period in question. Of course she was responsible. No doubt other people screwed up too, but according to the official FAQ they simply didn't have enough admin staff to keep up with the accounting work generated by the OPW and that too was her responsibility, because that's what being in charge means. Incidentally, she resigned about a fortnight before that announcement.

They weren't just bad at collecting money either - if I'm understanding their announcements and FAQ correctly, the OPW came with contractual deadlines for Gnome to pay participants but no similar deadlines for sponsors to pay Gnome, which is why they had to prioritize OPW payments over everything else.

No, it's not. The article they cited comprehensively rebuts your comment above --- it was as it was written specifically to object to that comment! And your attempt to retcon the comment into something congruent with the article further damages the credibility of your argument.

I'll note further that pejorative comments about "feminists" seems to be something of a "beat" of yours. Maybe you should lay off it for awhile.

> After all companies paid their share, the foundation became solvent. This is purely a business accounting issue arising from dealing with rapid growth because the outreach program was so successful.

I am completely ignorant of this situation, but it is clear that the source you provided doesn't dispute the allegations but instead provides further support that the allegations are true.

The outreach program was so successful that the company went out of business!

And it was the accounting department's fault! Not the person in charge! (anyone care for a game of office politics?)

Honestly, the allegation came across as absurd in the original post, but your post makes me think that the story might actually be true.

Whether the actual admin costs outweighed the admin fees is debatable. Otherwise, as you said, it was strictly a cash-flow problem and not one of general financial mismanagement. I think this issue should have been spotted by the board of directors but it didn't because it was common practice to do it this way (pay upfront, cash in later) and then the amount of outreach participants increased significantly without anybody in control thinking about all the implications that would have on the Foundation's cash-flow.

And nobody really believed that increasing the amount of paid-for outreach-positions is a bad thing.

> ...it was strictly a cash-flow problem and not one of general financial mismanagement.

I have no opinion on this particular case, but why doesn't a cash-flow problem count as a financial mismanagement problem?

Absolutely, and in all the minimally smart organizations I've worked for it's something the financial people always keep foremost in their minds. Screw it up, and you have to lay off the people who are doing the work that'll pay for the next increment of the org's operations (or tell them "if thus and so happens we'll pay you, until then you're welcome to continue working, we're storing your paychecks in the safe", as happened with Lisp Machines Inc. a couple of months before TI started investing in us).

The main point of the article is

> The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors

An “ad hominem” argument against the would-be representative doesn't sound like an appropriate response to that …

The big irony would be for her to get onto the board anyways...

I'm sure someone else will chime in to name the logical fallacy you're setting us off on. It's completely besides the point whom these actions were targeted against. And if they objected to her on merits, they should have objected to her on merits, not restructure the organisation in the way they did.

Sure, take an article that doesn't mention gender at all and make it all about gender and not GPL enforcement.

The real issue here is how the LF has stopped funding Conservancy and how VMWare is (or was?) a big member of the LF. This conflict of interest has resulted in the LF pulling funding for Software Conservancy. VMWare and others have thus twisted the LF into allowing GPL violations.

Trying to spin the whole story as "it's those damn feminists again!!" is quite annoying.

That is interesting and I haven't seen any mention of it other than your comment. Don't suppose you could point me to more information?

Edit: Ah, looks like it probably didn't make the news because the President of the SFC didn't want to comment on it and the details were murky: https://lwn.net/Articles/665855/

Conservancy won't publicly name anyone, but we do know that LF has given donations to SFC but will not give them one now. You can see this by looking at SFC's list of donors in archive.org. Bradley Kuhn, without naming anyone in particular, has also publicly said that several companies have said told him that they would not give SFC money if SFC kept up its work on GPL compliance.

We also know that the LF has at least VMWare and AllWinner in its ranks, and perhaps other companies with a vested interest in declawing the GPL. That, at least, seems to me like a conflict of interest.

At least one person associated to LF has publicly denied that LF is punishing SFC, but I remain skeptical:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/41x5ec/linux_foundat...

Ahs yes, greg KH. While he did good work with udev initially and stewarding the stable kernels, i fear he has sold out otherwise.

He was basically pitching kdbus on behalf on the automobile industry a year or two back, because they wanted a drop in replacement for QNX and its in-kernel RPC.

And you will find some "lovely" mailing list duels between him and Landley about documenting the interface between kernel and udev, as Landley was trying to develop a minimal udev replacement.

An executive director, as a rule, doesn't make choices, but carries the board's choices out. Jeff Fortin Tam (the president of the board of directors of GNOME) has pretty much confirmed this: http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2015/09/13/outrageous-outreach/

I'm not disputing GNOME had (has?) a problem - I'm not following anyway - or Garrett having an agenda (I mean come on, the LF never gave the community a voice, and the community never cared), but there seems to be no reason to accuse Sandler of mismanaging funds.

So the top comment on a thread regarding dropping community representation from a preeminent OSS project, at the time posting this reply, spends its ink sharing the authors opinion about a single individual and lays the blame at the feet of this individual for causing an entire foundation to run out of money, despite having backing from organizations like Google and Mozilla, and then further insinuates that it was all due to poorly executed and questionably justified minority outreach programs. All this is then followed up by a personal dig at another individual, again bringing up "feminist activist" issues as though that is reason or rational enough for us all to nod our head in agreement with them.

A single individual is rarely ever the reason an entire organization runs out of money or implements bad policy. Others must sign on and implement and sign off and not object.

Let's not have personal attacks on character; let's keep the thread focused on the issue. To direct attacks on an individual's character in order to make one's argument borders on bigotry and almost always qualifies as a bad argument.

This has nothing to do with feminism. In this day and age we can expect most to agree that the causes are worthwhile.

The problem here is simply put; piss poor financial management.

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