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LKML: Philipp Stanner: Re: linux: Goodbye from a Linux community volunteer

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Hello Linux-kernel community,<br />&gt; <br />&gt; I am sure you have already heard the news caused by the recent Greg'<br />&gt; commit<br />&gt; 6e90b675cf942e ("MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various<br />&gt; compliance<br />&gt; requirements."). As you may have noticed the change concerned some of<br />&gt; the<br />&gt; Ru-related developers removal from the list of the official kernel<br />&gt; maintainers,<br />&gt; including me.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; The community members rightly noted that the _quite_ short commit log<br />&gt; contained<br />&gt; very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No matter how<br />&gt; hard I<br />&gt; tried to get more details about the reason, alas the senior<br />&gt; maintainer I was<br />&gt; discussing the matter with haven't given an explanation to what<br />&gt; compliance<br />&gt; requirements that was. I won't cite the exact emails text since it<br />&gt; was a private<br />&gt; messaging, but the key words are "sanctions", "sorry", "nothing I can<br />&gt; do", "talk<br />&gt; to your (company) lawyer"... I can't say for all the guys affected by<br />&gt; the<br />&gt; change, but my work for the community has been purely _volunteer_ for<br />&gt; more than<br />&gt; a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that).<br />&gt; For that<br />&gt; reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after<br />&gt; the way the<br />&gt; patch has been merged in I don't really want to now. Silently, behind<br />&gt; everyone's<br />&gt; back, _bypassing_ the standard patch-review process, with no affected<br />&gt; developers/subsystem notified - it's indeed the worse way to do what<br />&gt; has been<br />&gt; done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years<br />&gt; of the<br />&gt; devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation<br />&gt; but<br />&gt; haven't we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at<br />&gt; least, no?..<br />&gt; <br />&gt; I can't believe the kernel senior maintainers didn't consider that<br />&gt; the patch<br />&gt; wouldn't go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control<br />&gt; with<br />&gt; unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in<br />&gt; the middle<br />&gt; or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to<br />&gt; solve the<br />&gt; problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path.<br />&gt; Alas what's<br />&gt; done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has<br />&gt; just been<br />&gt; fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the<br />&gt; political<br />&gt; ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community<br />&gt; has been built<br />&gt; on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who<br />&gt; else might<br />&gt; be sanctioned...), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad<br />&gt; signal to the<br />&gt; Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and<br />&gt; hobbyists like<br />&gt; 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 />&gt; <br />&gt; Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform<br />&gt; some<br />&gt; reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a<br />&gt; volunteer has<br />&gt; simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future<br />&gt; though).<br />&gt; But before saying goodbye I'd like to express my gratitude to all the<br />&gt; community<br />&gt; members I have been lucky to work with during all these years.<br />&gt; Specifically:<br />&gt; <br />&gt; NTB-folks, Jon, Dave, Allen. NTB was my starting point in the kernel<br />&gt; upstream<br />&gt; work. Thanks for the initial advices and despite of very-very-very<br />&gt; tough reviews<br />&gt; with several complete patchset refactorings, I learned a lot back<br />&gt; then. That<br />&gt; experience helped me afterwards. Thanks a lot for that. BTW since<br />&gt; then I've got<br />&gt; several thank-you letters for the IDT NTB and IDT EEPROM drivers. If<br />&gt; not for you<br />&gt; it wouldn't have been possible.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Andy, it's hard to remember who else would have given me more on my<br />&gt; Linux kernel<br />&gt; journey as you have. We first met in the I2C subsystem review of my<br />&gt; DW I2C<br />&gt; driver patches. Afterwards we've got to be frequently meeting here<br />&gt; and there -<br />&gt; GPIO, SPI, TTY, DMA, NET, etc, clean/fixes/features patch(set)s.<br />&gt; Quite heat<br />&gt; discussions in your first reviews drove me crazy really. But all the<br />&gt; time we<br />&gt; managed to come up with some consensus somehow. And you never quit<br />&gt; the<br />&gt; discussions calmly explaining your point over and over. You never<br />&gt; refused to<br />&gt; provide more detailed justification to your requests/comments even<br />&gt; though you<br />&gt; didn't have to. Thanks to that I learned how to be patient to<br />&gt; reviewers<br />&gt; and reviewees. And of course thank you for the Linux-kernel<br />&gt; knowledges and all<br />&gt; the tips and tricks you shared.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; * Andy, please note due to the situation I am not going to work on my<br />&gt; DW DMAC<br />&gt; fixes patchset anymore. So if you ever wish to have DW UART stably<br />&gt; working with the<br />&gt; DW DMA-engine driver, then feel free to pick the series up:<br />&gt; Link:<br />&gt; <a href="https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer&#64;gmail.com/">https://lore.kernel.org/dmaengine/20240911184710.4207-1-fancer.lancer&#64;gmail.com/</a><br />&gt; <br />&gt; Linus (Walleij), after you merged one of my pretty much heavy<br />&gt; patchset in you<br />&gt; suggested to me to continue the DW APB GPIO driver maintaining. It<br />&gt; was a first<br />&gt; time I was asked to maintain a not-my driver. Thank you for the<br />&gt; trust. I'll<br />&gt; never forget that.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Mark, thank you very much for entrusting the DW APB SSI driver<br />&gt; maintenance to<br />&gt; me. I've put a lot of efforts into making it more generic and less<br />&gt; errors-prune,<br />&gt; especially when it comes working under a DMA-engine control or<br />&gt; working in the<br />&gt; mem-ops mode. I am sure the results have been beneficial to a lot of<br />&gt; DW<br />&gt; SPI-controller users since then.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Damien, our first and last meeting was at my generic AHCI-platform<br />&gt; and DW AHCI<br />&gt; SATA driver patches review. You didn't make it a quick and easy path.<br />&gt; But still<br />&gt; all the reviews comments were purely on the technical basis, and the<br />&gt; patches<br />&gt; were eventually merged in. Thank you for your time and experience<br />&gt; I've got from<br />&gt; the reviews.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Paul, Thomas, Arnd, Jiaxun, we met several times in the mailing list<br />&gt; during my<br />&gt; MIPS P5600 patches and just generic MIPS patches review. It was<br />&gt; always a<br />&gt; pleasure to discuss the matters with such brilliant experts in the<br />&gt; field. Alas<br />&gt; I've spent too much time working on the patches for another<br />&gt; subsystems and<br />&gt; failed to submit all the MIPS-related bits. Sorry I didn't keep my<br />&gt; promise, but<br />&gt; as you can see the circumstances have suddenly drawn its own<br />&gt; deadline.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Bjorn, Mani, we were working quite a lot with you in the framework of<br />&gt; the DW<br />&gt; PCIe RC drivers. You reviewed my patches. I helped you to review<br />&gt; another patches<br />&gt; for some time. Despite of some arguing it was always a pleasure to<br />&gt; work with<br />&gt; you.  Mani, special thanks for the cooperative DW eDMA driver<br />&gt; maintenance. I<br />&gt; think we were doing a great work together.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Paolo, Jakub, David, Andrew, Vladimir, Russell. The network subsystem<br />&gt; and<br />&gt; particularly the STMMAC driver (no doubt the driver sucks) have<br />&gt; turned to be a<br />&gt; kind of obstacle on which my current Linux-kernel activity has<br />&gt; stopped. I really<br />&gt; hope that at least in some way my help with the incoming STMMAC and<br />&gt; DW XPCS<br />&gt; patches reviews lightened up your maintainance duty. I know Russell<br />&gt; might<br />&gt; disagree, but I honestly think that all our discussions were useful<br />&gt; after all,<br />&gt; at least for me. I also think we did a great work working together<br />&gt; with Russell<br />&gt; on the DW GMAC/QoS ETH PCS patches. Hopefully you'll find a time to<br />&gt; finish it up<br />&gt; after all. <br />&gt; <br />&gt; Rob, Krzysztof, from your reviews I've learned a lot about the most<br />&gt; hardwary part<br />&gt; of the kernel - DT sources and DT-bindings. All your comments have<br />&gt; been laconic<br />&gt; and straight to the point. That made reviews quick and easy. Thank<br />&gt; you very<br />&gt; much for that.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Guenter, special thanks for reviewing and accepting my patches to the<br />&gt; hwmon and<br />&gt; watchdog subsystems. It was pleasure to be working with you.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Borislav, we disagreed and argued a lot. So my DW uMCTL2 DDRC EDAC<br />&gt; patches even<br />&gt; got stuck in limbo for quite a long time. Anyway thank you for the<br />&gt; time<br />&gt; you spent reviewing my patches and trying to explain your point.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; * Borislav, it looks like I won't be able to work on my Synopsys EDAC<br />&gt; patchsets<br />&gt; anymore. If you or somebody else could pick them up and finish up the<br />&gt; work it<br />&gt; would be great (you can find it in the lore archive). The patches<br />&gt; convert the<br />&gt; mainly Zynq(MP)-specific Synopsys EDAC driver to supporting the<br />&gt; generic DW<br />&gt; uMCTL2 DDRC. It would be very beneficial for each platform based on<br />&gt; that<br />&gt; controller.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Greg, we met several times in the mailing lists. You reviewed my<br />&gt; patches sent<br />&gt; for the USB and TTY subsystems, and all the time the process was<br />&gt; straight,<br />&gt; highly professional, and simpler than in the most of my other case.<br />&gt; Thank you very much for that.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Yoshihiro, Keguang, Yanteng, Kory, Cai and everybody I was lucky to<br />&gt; meet in the<br />&gt; kernel mailing lists, but forgot to mention here. Thank you for the<br />&gt; time spent<br />&gt; for our cooperative work on making the Linux kernel better. It was a<br />&gt; pleasure to<br />&gt; meet you here.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; I also wish to say huge thanks to the community members trying to<br />&gt; defend the kicked off maintainers and for support you expressed in<br />&gt; these days. It means a lot.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; A little bit statics of my kernel-work at the end:<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Signed-off patches: 518<br />&gt; Reviewed and Acked patches: 253<br />&gt; Tested patches: 80<br />&gt; <br />&gt; You might say not the greatest achievement for seven years comparing<br />&gt; to some<br />&gt; other developers. Perhaps. But I meant each of these tags, be sure.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; I guess that's it. If you ever need some info or consultation<br />&gt; regarding the<br />&gt; drivers I used to maintain or the respective hardware or the Synopsys<br />&gt; IP-cores<br />&gt; (about which I've got quite comprehensive knowledge by this time),<br />&gt; feel free to<br />&gt; reach me out via this email. I am always willing to help to the<br />&gt; community<br />&gt; members.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Hope we'll meet someday in more pleasant circumstances and drink a<br />&gt; couple or more beers together. But now it's time to say good bye.<br />&gt; Sorry for a long-read text. I wish good luck on your Linux-way.<br />&gt; <br />&gt; Best Regards,<br />&gt; -Serge(y)<br />&gt; <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>

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