On 27/12/15 20:48, Ruben Safir wrote:
On 12/27/2015 03:17 AM, Andrew Wafaa wrote:
The decision to ban Carlos was not Richard's, it was the openSUSE Board elected by members of the openSUSE project that decided. Those members are people who are active within the project, helping drive the innovation forward and ensuring that openSUSE stays competitive with our peers. Those members have entrusted the Board to look after the best interests of the project, and that is what they strive to do.
The Board received multiple complaints from openSUSE members about Carlos' activity on the mailing lists, especially on opensuse-factory. Several people have tried to explain that bombarding a mailing list with emails which don't reflect the topic of the list - factory is for Tumbleweed and developmental issues. Carlos believed he was doing no wrong and continued to ignore people's public and private complaints.
This is when the Board took the decision to give Carlos a warning, which he also decided to ignore. We then voted on what action to take. That is when the decision to ban Carlos came up. Several Board members felt a much harder line should have been taken, Richard was actually one that calmed some of us down - to be frankly honest I am one of those that felt this is too weak.
If you would like some definitive action, may I suggest you walk the talk instead of just firing your mouth off. Postulating like that benefits no-one and those that actually care and roll their sleeves up with contributions ignore much of these theatrics.
I have a better idea, let them all resign rather that pretending that was reason enough to ban someone from any of the OpenSuSE channels, let enough ALL of them.
Frankly Andrew, you should leave and the project would be better off. There is never a need for anyone like you, regardless of any contribution you make. The Moral Price is too high. You just don't treat people like that unless your a Facist, let alone someone like Carlos who has put in nearly 20 years of continual community service.
What's wrong with you Andrew? You don't know how to use procmail either when someone is annoying you, rather than amuse supreme dictatorship position and not only ban him from factory, but ban him ***across the board***.
This just tells me and the whole world that your a totally asshole who if ever had a semblance of real power or authority would be a threat to the general public. What is next? Call in the Muslim Brotherhood and have him executed by stoning?
Step Down Andrew. Do the right thing and preclude yourself from any involvement with the public until you've had a complete psychological evaluation with a medical follow up.
Ruben
In an earlier post you raised posed three solutions to what you called an "impasse": quote A0 The best by far would be for the board to admit they made an grievous error in judgment, reinstate Carlos and recluse themselves from any meddling with the mailing list in the future. B) The board resigns altogether and never works with opensuse again. That would be a great solution. C) The mailing list is moved so that politics of board can never again be used as a tool to destroy the user value of this list to the suse community at large. unquote I mulled over what you posed and was going to respond when Andrei wrote a message which stated (in part): quote So am I right that definition of "community" that was mentioned here so often in relation to "community distribution" is restricted to "openSUSE members" and explicitly excludes anyone else? unquote to which I was also going to reply because of what Andrew Wafaa stated in his post in openSUSE-announce: quote Only openSUSE members have the right to run for a board seat, except if they are in the Election Committee. unquote which reinforced my own thoughts which I have had for some time about "The Board" and I was going to respond to Andrei's post when you wrote what you did above. So this post of mine tries to include a response to all three posts. To begin with, re your comment above suggesting that Andrew take himself off the board. It is now the election time for the board (for the year 2016/x) and Andrew is one of the Election Officers and because his time expires to be a board member he, as an Election Officer, is precluded from standing for re-election. In his post in openSUSE-announce on 8 December he wrote: quote This year, there will be 3 seats to be elected, all for a standard 2 year (24 months) term : - Andrew Wafaa, Bruno Friedman and Robert Schweikert seats all need filling. unquote (BTW, even before the announcement re the elections was made, Robert advised, second week of November, everyone (well, in openSUSE-project at least) that he was no "longer able to provide the enthusiasm and time to the openSUSE Board and the project that [he] believe[s] both deserve." which is why his vacancy is now up for election.) So, asking for the board to resign as this point in time can only be symbolic and as an expression of the way people feel about the way the board has handled this matter of having one of most prolific helpers of this distribution (now) called openSUSE banned -- and it matters not one iota arguing that it is for only a limited time. The damage has been done. Now, the board is up for election with the final results of the election to be announced by the end of January 2016 -- EXCEPT for one position on the board namely, the chairman who is always appointed by SUSE from amongst its paid employees. The question now is: while *some* board members are up for election/re-election, will the current chairman be re-appointed as chairman or will SUSE appoint someone else? Re the general question of "The Board". I have had 2 "nagging", for wants of a better word, thoughts about "The Board" for quite some time: 1) the necessity for having one; and 2) how the members are elected. Let's start with 2) -- which is what Andrei touched on in his post. We have this pseudo, mumbo-jumbo "community" created by giving people "@opensuse.org" e-mail addresses and it is only these people who are allowed to vote in the election for members of the board. The "community members" are also, as far as I am aware, but I am way open to be educated, only those who have shown to someone that they have "contributed" to the openSUSE distro. But the ordinary plebs, the "untouchables", who simply use the system -- and who are constantly told to "contribute" -- are excluded from the election process which means, to my way of thinking, that an elite few are the only ones who elect the board members. Now, don't think that I am not aware of the arguments about how does one get EVERY use to vote or even determine that they are users of openSUSE (I mean, you'll get Windows users voting) and that the only way to make sure that people are eligible to vote is to keep a record of their names etc etc etc -- and which then brings up the past debates about how to maintain a list of "community members" on which much time and effort has been spent (if they don't respond to an e-mail after 2 years then treat them as non-members, yackety-yack, and so on). The bottom line is: why have all this nonsense? Why have this "Board" to begin with? I ask this question because from some of the posts by the current chairman appear to negate -- even though he tries to go out of his way (as The Bard wrote, "Me thinks the Lady doth protest too much!") to say otherwise -- what the charter of the board is as spelt out in the following: quote The openSUSE board was setup to lead the overall project. The main tasks for members of the board are: *Act as a central point of contact *Help resolve conflicts *Communicate community interests to SUSE *Facilitate communication with all areas of the community *Facilitate decision making processes where needed. The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project. The board should document decisions and policies. unquote https://en.opensuse.org/Board Now, who sees the obvious contradiction in the above goals and what has happened to provoke all the angst expressed in this forum? Who was it who said, "The buck stops here."? (And one more thing -- the last sentence states, "The board should document decisions and policies.". Where are the minutes which document the decisions, the decision regarding Carlos for example? I remember, as I am sure some others will also remember, that the Minutes of board meetings were made available in openSUSE I think but certainly posted online -- and I always gave them a quick glance. But I haven't seen any for quite some time.) OK, sorry, did not mean to get sidelined -- back to the question concerning the board. Is it really necessary to have a board? I mean, the current chairman states that one cannot tell volunteers -- ie, "community members" or "maintainers" -- what to do then what is the point of going through a lot of tomfoolery to have several people elected to an innefective board? I can now just get the feeling that there will be someone who will come up with the argument that one of the goals of the board is to promote openSUSE by, say, arranging the stalls at the exhibitions (whatever they are called) and then scrounging around for money to keep the whole sheebang going. But what the hell is SUSE all about and its employees? Doesn't SUSE promote itself as a viable system? If it does why not promote also its partner openSUSE or is it quite happy to have SUSE being used in commercial premises but then the employees of those businesses then going home to use Windows or MAC? The question here comes up: there has been a merging (and who brought this about, BTW? anyone know?) of openSUSE with SUSE in the form of Leap so openSUSE is less of a Project on its own as it was before -- and certainly not like Kubuntu which Canonical abandoned to its own devices. By the way, if you think that what I just stated is not keeping to the "topic" then have a look at the link when you click on "guidance" which is in the penultimate sentence in the quote above re the board; the link is to https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Guiding_principles where it is written in blood and engraved in stone: quote We want to... *create the world's best Linux distribution *foster the success of Linux *make users happy *foster innovation *be open and work transparently *work together with upstream projects *collaborate with other communities *have a lot of fun! unquote and other motherhood goals. But at this very moment, are we having "a lot of fun!"? And whose fault is it that we are at the moment NOT having "a lot of fun"? And it's not Carlos I can tell you that. BC -- Using openSUSE 13.2, KDE 4.14.9 & kernel 4.3.3-3 on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX660 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org