Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board | Hacker News Reader

Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board

discourse.gnome.org

66 pointsOmegaDungeon73 comments

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".

Which is criminal libel.

Suggesting that the aggrieved party is fictional is, indeed, criminal libel.

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.)

You know perfectly well what was meant despite being technically correct due to the misplaced quotes.

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)

And it's not as if that gives anyone on the CoC committe who has it in for him a motive to leave those resolutions pending forever, now is it...?

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.

The web is no longer open like it was in 2000.

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?

> If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

Regardless of where someone stands in this particular conversation, perceived injustice is bad even for those who are only indirectly affected by it.

I guess that most of the injustice we read about in the media is about something that doesn't directly affect us as a reader.

Yet we are affected by it. This is because people tend to want to contribute to a just society. ..so essentially, people tend to dislike injustice.

This is some variant of the "you are using your iPhone while criticizing corporations" argument.

> If you use GNOME, you have inherent trust in that administration as the governing body for the software on your computer.

Yeah... And this goes to show how misplaced that trust is.

> If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

1) As a confirmation and reminder to myself of my decision never to use that stuff, should I ever waver in the future.

2) As an argument to convince others to also avoid it like the fucking bubonic plague.

HTH! (But honestly, that was pretty obvious; how could anyone not see that for oneself?)

>If you don't use GNOME, why is this interesting to you anyway?

GTK?

Saw this on the thread:

> 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.

Yeah, I saw that too. Not about to get a posting ID there, so I'll say here what I thought there:

> I worry that it could start unnecessary drama.

What that commenter apparently missed was the worse possibility (or probability), that it will suppress "drama" that would have been necessary.

> 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.

Redefining transparency to a perfunctory level does nothing but reinforce the idea that it is a star chamber.

"Star chamber" is a fabulous term that would seem to describe the situation quite well. Thanks, added to my internal dictionary!

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.

It's also ambiguous as to if he was removed for a CoC violation. It just says he was removed "for cause". It then goes on to state (emphasis mine):

"A Code of Conduct complaint was also made against Sonny Piers."

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.

Your sweeping statement would have more impact if you offered some examples of foundations you think only serve themselves.

Well, the Gnome Foundation sure seems to be sailing up as a candidate...

Not the person who wrote it but DotNet Foundation comes to mind.

Am I missing something here? The minutes give no real details about anything

It's all rather vague

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.

Of course, now they hide it under a veneer of concern and protecting hypothetical victims.

I'm not sure, but code of conduct was breached, so could be the usual whenever code of conduct is brought up.

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.

How do you know "code of conduct was breached"? We only know that there was a complaint, that it was breached.

AFAIK, the word "breached" can also be interpreted as "brought up in discussion". So maybe that was what the GP meant.

Or, come to think of it, is the phrase "the subject was broached in the discussion" what I was thinking of? Note the 'o', not 'e'.

Sorry, now I'm thinking I was wrong above.

The problem is that, looking back at GNOME history, we get curious about what really happened.

But Sonny is not protesting or something, so we cannot say anything about it.

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.

Gnome is kind of junk nowdays, right? Haven't used since slack 7.

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.

Last time I tried was in Ubuntu 20.something and ... yes it was trash.

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.)

Frankly, does it matter?

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.

Ubuntu desktop is Ubuntu desktop, not Gnome desktop.

It uses Gnome but it isn't Gnome.

It's 99% GNOME with few additions that can be disabled if you want a more pure experience

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.

are they going to remove his contributions to gnome?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com