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LKML: Philipp Stanner: Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer
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As you may have noticed the change concerned some of<br />> the<br />> Ru-related developers removal from the list of the official kernel<br />> maintainers,<br />> including me.<br />> <br />> The community members rightly noted that the _quite_ short commit log<br />> contained<br />> very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No matter how<br />> hard I<br />> tried to get more details about the reason, alas the senior<br />> maintainer I was<br />> discussing the matter with haven't given an explanation to what<br />> compliance<br />> requirements that was. I won't cite the exact emails text since it<br />> was a private<br />> messaging, but the key words are "sanctions", "sorry", "nothing I can<br />> do", "talk<br />> to your (company) lawyer"... I can't say for all the guys affected by<br />> the<br />> change, but my work for the community has been purely _volunteer_ for<br />> more than<br />> a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that).<br />> For that<br />> reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after<br />> the way the<br />> patch has been merged in I don't really want to now. Silently, behind<br />> everyone's<br />> back, _bypassing_ the standard patch-review process, with no affected<br />> developers/subsystem notified - it's indeed the worse way to do what<br />> has been<br />> done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years<br />> of the<br />> devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation<br />> but<br />> haven't we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at<br />> least, no?..<br />> <br />> I can't believe the kernel senior maintainers didn't consider that<br />> the patch<br />> wouldn't go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control<br />> with<br />> unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in<br />> the middle<br />> or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to<br />> solve the<br />> problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path.<br />> Alas what's<br />> done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has<br />> just been<br />> fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the<br />> political<br />> ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community<br />> has been built<br />> on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who<br />> else might<br />> be sanctioned...), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad<br />> signal to the<br />> Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and<br />> hobbyists like<br />> me.<br /><br />I'm also quite shocked and even baffled about how this has been<br />handled. This is not how leaders should communicate difficult or big<br />decisions. It's the most disappointing event I have witnessed in the<br />project.<br /><br />There is the form and there is the content – about the content one<br />cannot do much, when the state he or his organization resides in gives<br />an order.<br /><br />But about the form one can indeed do much. No "Thank you!", no "I hope<br />we can work together again once the world has become sane(r)"... srsly,<br />what the hell.<br /><br />No idea why they felt the need to do it that way, but it certainly is<br />not the open source way, neither is it decent or honorable.<br /><br /><br />That said, thank you for all your work, Serge!<br /><br />I believe that nothing that has been accomplished with a candid mindset<br />and decent intentions is ever done for nothing, although it often pays<br />off way differently than expected.<br />So I hope this will be the case for you, too.<br /><br />Take care,<br />Philipp<br /><br /><br />> <br />> Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform<br />> some<br />> reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a<br />> volunteer has<br />> simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future<br />> though).<br />> But before saying goodbye I'd like to express my gratitude to all the<br />> community<br />> members I have been lucky to work with during all these years.<br />> Specifically:<br />> <br />> NTB-folks, Jon, Dave, Allen. NTB was my starting point in the kernel<br />> upstream<br />> work. Thanks for the initial advices and despite of very-very-very<br />> tough reviews<br />> with several complete patchset refactorings, I learned a lot back<br />> then. That<br />> experience helped me afterwards. Thanks a lot for that. BTW since<br />> then I've got<br />> several thank-you letters for the IDT NTB and IDT EEPROM drivers. If<br />> not for you<br />> it wouldn't have been possible.<br />> <br />> Andy, it's hard to remember who else would have given me more on my<br />> Linux kernel<br />> journey as you have. We first met in the I2C subsystem review of my<br />> DW I2C<br />> driver patches. Afterwards we've got to be frequently meeting here<br />> and there -<br />> GPIO, SPI, TTY, DMA, NET, etc, clean/fixes/features patch(set)s.<br />> Quite heat<br />> discussions in your first reviews drove me crazy really. But all the<br />> time we<br />> managed to come up with some consensus somehow. And you never quit<br />> the<br />> discussions calmly explaining your point over and over. You never<br />> refused to<br />> provide more detailed justification to your requests/comments even<br />> though you<br />> didn't have to. Thanks to that I learned how to be patient to<br />> reviewers<br />> and reviewees. And of course thank you for the Linux-kernel<br />> knowledges and all<br />> the tips and tricks you shared.<br />> <br />> * Andy, please note due to the situation I am not going to work on my<br />> DW DMAC<br />> fixes patchset anymore. So if you ever wish to have DW UART stably<br />> working with the<br />> DW DMA-engine driver, then feel free to pick the series up:<br />> Link:<br />> <a href="https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer@gmail.com/">https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer@gmail.com/</a><br />> <br />> Linus (Walleij), after you merged one of my pretty much heavy<br />> patchset in you<br />> suggested to me to continue the DW APB GPIO driver maintaining. It<br />> was a first<br />> time I was asked to maintain a not-my driver. Thank you for the<br />> trust. I'll<br />> never forget that.<br />> <br />> Mark, thank you very much for entrusting the DW APB SSI driver<br />> maintenance to<br />> me. I've put a lot of efforts into making it more generic and less<br />> errors-prune,<br />> especially when it comes working under a DMA-engine control or<br />> working in the<br />> mem-ops mode. I am sure the results have been beneficial to a lot of<br />> DW<br />> SPI-controller users since then.<br />> <br />> Damien, our first and last meeting was at my generic AHCI-platform<br />> and DW AHCI<br />> SATA driver patches review. You didn't make it a quick and easy path.<br />> But still<br />> all the reviews comments were purely on the technical basis, and the<br />> patches<br />> were eventually merged in. Thank you for your time and experience<br />> I've got from<br />> the reviews.<br />> <br />> Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list<br />> during my<br />> MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was<br />> always a<br />> pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the<br />> field. Alas<br />> I've spent too much time working on the patches for another<br />> subsystems and<br />> failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn't keep my<br />> promise, but<br />> as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own<br />> deadline.<br />> <br />> Bjorn, Mani, we were working quite a lot with you in the framework of<br />> the DW<br />> PCIe RC drivers. You reviewed my patches. I helped you to review<br />> another patches<br />> for some time. Despite of some arguing it was always a pleasure to<br />> work with<br />> you. Mani, special thanks for the cooperative DW eDMA driver<br />> maintenance. I<br />> think we were doing a great work together.<br />> <br />> Paolo, Jakub, David, Andrew, Vladimir, Russell. The network subsystem<br />> and<br />> particularly the STMMAC driver (no doubt the driver sucks) have<br />> turned to be a<br />> kind of obstacle on which my current Linux-kernel activity has<br />> stopped. I really<br />> hope that at least in some way my help with the incoming STMMAC and<br />> DW XPCS<br />> patches reviews lightened up your maintainance duty. I know Russell<br />> might<br />> disagree, but I honestly think that all our discussions were useful<br />> after all,<br />> at least for me. I also think we did a great work working together<br />> with Russell<br />> on the DW GMAC/QoS ETH PCS patches. Hopefully you'll find a time to<br />> finish it up<br />> after all. <br />> <br />> Rob, Krzysztof, from your reviews I've learned a lot about the most<br />> hardwary part<br />> of the kernel - DT sources and DT-bindings. All your comments have<br />> been laconic<br />> and straight to the point. That made reviews quick and easy. Thank<br />> you very<br />> much for that.<br />> <br />> Guenter, special thanks for reviewing and accepting my patches to the<br />> hwmon and<br />> watchdog subsystems. It was pleasure to be working with you.<br />> <br />> Borislav, we disagreed and argued a lot. So my DW uMCTL2 DDRC EDAC<br />> patches even<br />> got stuck in limbo for quite a long time. Anyway thank you for the<br />> time<br />> you spent reviewing my patches and trying to explain your point.<br />> <br />> * Borislav, it looks like I won't be able to work on my Synopsys EDAC<br />> patchsets<br />> anymore. If you or somebody else could pick them up and finish up the<br />> work it<br />> would be great (you can find it in the lore archive). The patches<br />> convert the<br />> mainly Zynq(MP)-specific Synopsys EDAC driver to supporting the<br />> generic DW<br />> uMCTL2 DDRC. It would be very beneficial for each platform based on<br />> that<br />> controller.<br />> <br />> Greg, we met several times in the mailing lists. You reviewed my<br />> patches sent<br />> for the USB and TTY subsystems, and all the time the process was<br />> straight,<br />> highly professional, and simpler than in the most of my other case.<br />> Thank you very much for that.<br />> <br />> Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to<br />> meet in the<br />> kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the<br />> time spent<br />> for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a<br />> pleasure to<br />> meet you here.<br />> <br />> I also wish to say huge thanks to the community members trying to<br />> defend the kicked off maintainers and for support you expressed in<br />> these days. It means a lot.<br />> <br />> A little bit statics of my kernel-work at the end:<br />> <br />> Signed-off patches: 518<br />> Reviewed and Acked patches: 253<br />> Tested patches: 80<br />> <br />> You might say not the greatest achievement for seven years comparing<br />> to some<br />> other developers. Perhaps. But I meant each of these tags, be sure.<br />> <br />> I guess that's it. If you ever need some info or consultation<br />> regarding the<br />> drivers I used to maintain or the respective hardware or the Synopsys<br />> IP-cores<br />> (about which I've got quite comprehensive knowledge by this time),<br />> feel free to<br />> reach me out via this email. I am always willing to help to the<br />> community<br />> members.<br />> <br />> Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a<br />> couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.<br />> Sorry for a long-read text. I wish good luck on your Linux-way.<br />> <br />> Best Regards,<br />> -Serge(y)<br />> <br /><br /><br /></pre></td><td width="32" rowspan="2" class="c" valign="top"><img src="/images/icornerr.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="\" /></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="bottom"> </td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="bottom"> </td><td class="c" valign="bottom" style="padding-bottom: 0px"><img src="/images/bcornerl.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="\" /></td><td class="c"> </td><td class="c" valign="bottom" style="padding-bottom: 0px"><img src="/images/bcornerr.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="/" /></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="top" colspan="2"> </td><td class="lm">Last update: 2024-10-24 09:33 [from the cache]<br />©2003-2020 <a href="http://blog.jasper.es/"><span itemprop="editor">Jasper Spaans</span></a>|hosted at <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=9a8e99d24cf9">Digital Ocean</a> and my Meterkast|<a href="http://blog.jasper.es/categories.html#lkml-ref">Read the blog</a></td><td> </td></tr></table><script language="javascript" src="/js/styleswitcher.js" type="text/javascript"></script></body></html>