[CentOS-devel] Vote of Confidence

On Sat, Jan 2, 2021 at 12:10 AM redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel
<centos-devel at centos.org> wrote:
> Is centos-questions also a mailman mailing list?  Where do I find archives of the questions already asked and answered?

centos-questions is the opposite of "open" / "shining a flashlight on
the Elephant". It's a private forum that the "community" has no access
to contribute to or evaluate the responses to other users. The
centos-questions discussion forum represents a vendor relationship,
not a community relationship. centos-questions allows the narrative to
be controlled by isolating the users from each other, and then
presenting a Red Hat perspective of the world in response to
individual questions from individual users. There are no "checks and
balances" in this system.

Statements like "these are not sales people" ("these are not the
droids you are looking for") are pretty clear evidence that the optics
of it, and the conflict of interest it represents, is recognized by
those making the statements. What difference does it make if they are
sales people or not? It's still a closed forum with a vendor. If I am
talking to a vendor, I generally invite the sales person into the
room, because I want them to be a part of the solution as well. The
problem was never that they might be sales people. The problem is that
it's not a open / community forum. (But, what if it *is* a "community"
forum... more on this below...)

> > An unoffical vote here to publicly ask people to resign is one step too
> > much.
> Maybe I didn't make myself clear.  I am not asking they resign from Red Hat.  I am asking that they resign from the governance board to make room for active community members to take the seats.
>
> The description of a meritocracy based governance model is available here:
> https://www.centos.org/about/governance/appendix-glossary/
>
> Where is the merit in them holding the seats?  What work have they done towards CentOS being a downstream clone of RHEL?

I'm amused because the problem you and I have, is that we are trying
to enforce what we *believed* to be the definition of words like
"merit" and "community". However, these words have been redefined.
Since 2014, "merit" means participating in CentOS the way Red Hat
defines acceptable methods of participation, and one form of
participation that was clearly not acceptable as a valid contribution
(= merit) was "users":

""" Mike McGrath, Red Hat's VP of Linux Engineering, let the cat out
of the bag in an interview with Christine Hall in ITPro Today. "I
would say the big one for us was that CentOS itself was not actually
providing that much usefulness to Red Hat. Most of the communities we
set up, Fedora, for example, do have a lot of bidirectional community
involvement. Unfortunately, CentOS was never like that. It was always
a community of users, so that contribution model was mostly one way."
"""

Since 2014, "community" is the community of developers that Red Hat
was building, by hiring them, and providing them resources, not the
"community" of users. As Mike McGraph helpfully clarified for us, "a
community of users, so that contribution model was mostly one way"
meaning that users essentially do not contribute.

"community" may include officially approved SIG participants, but it's
not clear to me that Red Hat consulted with all of the SIG
participants before proceeding with their plan either. And downstream
"SIG" that were never officially approved or recognized, also don't
count as contributors (= merit).

So, by the Red Hat definition - the board members have merit. They
contribute as Red Hat has asked them to. Red Hat is paying for the
community to exist, remember (or, so this narrative claims), so Red
Hat gets to decide what community contribution looks like. They are
doing exactly the job Red Hat wants them to be doing. They may even be
GREAT at this job.

This is what an acquisition looks like. We are just too naive to
accept it still.

> It has been 7 weeks since the vote for CentOS to abandon it's 10 year commitment down to 2 years.  They have not been active members of any CentOS mailing list before that point and have not attempted to rectify that in the last 7 weeks.  At the very least an introduction and more information about their participation would be nice.

As per above - "active participant in mailing list", isn't an approved
definition of merit. It's just one that you and I presume should be
true, but clearly isn't. If our view was the correct one, they would
have been removed from the board years ago. You can't ask for a vote
of non-confidence in them just because they didn't participate in the
mailing list. Red Hat has full confidence in them, and appreciates
their service as they are currently providing it. Who are you to say
otherwise? What is your Red Hat recognized role that would allow your
opinion to matter? :-)

> > If CentOS really means that much to you, it seems there will be
> > alternatives, like rocky linux, to meet your needs. You might better go
> > there and provide them some help.
> This repeatly sounds like Red Hat beating a drum demanding the community be the ones to resign from CentOS.
> You know what, asking active participates of the CentOS community to resign is a bit much.

I think the "community" was asked to resign in 2014, when Red Hat came
in and said "you are a failing community, we will now take over your
community and replace your members with our own, run the way we want".
Taking over the "CentOS" brand, and making it a Red Hat property, was
an essential step in this process, as it turns out, it prevents
"CentOS" from operating outside of Red Hat controls. Enter, "Rocky".

> > I think I might simply unsub from this mailing list because
> > everything has been said about stream and people keep pushing. You
> > should have enough material to make your own choices.
> >
> > Let's just work together to make stream great - working together is what
> > open source is about.
> This sounds like a call to the community.  That is putting the cart in front of the horse.  Can we first get how cutting CentOS 8's life cycle  to only 2 years is showing commitment to supporting Stream for 5 years?  Or can we get how Stream's obfuscated kernel patches is consistent with Red Hat closing the openness gap?  Or can we get any infomration at all from the four governance members that can't even introduce themselves on centos-devel?

Personally, I never joined a "stream" community. It could be
worthwhile, but it's an entirely new thing that only *looks* like the
previous thing. This makes it an open question as to who will join
this new community. Clearly, the paid Red Hat staff will join. Also,
several upstream maintainers of components that need to integrate with
EL will join. But, will the EL user community join? I think depends
upon requirements, and generally the answer will be no, they will not
join.

The community as we know it already moved to other places like Rocky.
And, it's a pretty great community by all appearances. It is what
CentOS should have become in 2014, but put on hold for 6 years, until
forced to unite by a vendor that claimed "CentOS" for their own
purposes.

> Open Source is a two way street.  It is a licensing model for putting everyone on equal footing.  Working together is a result of having that two way street.
>
> Before 2014 we had a two way street.  If the key members of CentOS decided it was time to work on something else, CentOS could be forked into a CentOS-NG or CentOS++ (or both).  Red Hat took that two way street away and now has leveraged trademarks to redefine fundmental definitions of what CentOS is.  They accomplished this by ignoring the core value of meritocracy by packing the governance board with those without merit and a lack of respect for the community.
>
> What we have now is a cathederal model.  Let's work together to re-establish the bizaar.  That is what open source is all about.

We still have a two-way street. Just, "CentOS" has been re-purposed,
and is no longer available as a name for the original project known as
"CentOS". If we just s/CentOS/Rocky/g everywhere, we can get past this
unfortunate bit of history without too many casualties.

I was angry a few weeks ago. Now, I'm just amused. Red Hat acquired
CentOS, but didn't like it. So, they cancelled it but adopted the
brand as their own since they liked the brand, and they liked the
developers, so they are keeping the developers. They are just
assigning them to RHEL stabilization work as their new roles. It's a
pretty audacious plan. We'll see how it plays out in real life.

-- 
Mark Mielke <mark.mielke at gmail.com>