[OpenWrt-Devel] reboot

[Imre Kaloz]

On Fri, 06 May 2016 12:50:32 +0200, John Crispin <john at phrozen.org> wrote:

> the reboot was not meant to be hostile or disruptive to OpenWrt. we are
> just code nerds and messed up the politics of the launch at some places,
> which in itself shows one of the reasons that motivated the reboot. the
> whole idea is to give up our control over parts of the politics and
> attract a new generation. a small none elected crowd has been making
> decisions that essentially are not ours to make but effect us all. these
> decisions have been made largely behind closed doors.

You were part of the "small none elected crowd".

> the whole thing started by the workload becoming unbearable on a few. we
> felt the need to simply stop or make drastic changes. giving up and just
> letting it all bitrot seemed to be the easy way out, but we did feel
> that we had a debt to our own heritage. simply leaving seemed bad and
> unfair on the community. we decided to get the project back on track
> instead.

So instead of exercising your right as a release manager or Felix his as  
the lead developer you've prepared LEDE. And don't tell me you didn't have  
the power, fro example procd and netifd were introduced without voting or  
everyone's agreement for example. Don't get me wrong, we're talking about  
how changes were introduced, not the nature of these changes.

> we’ll be the first to agree that things where not peachy at times. this
> however does not boil down to one single event, one single person or one
> single flamewar. we are just many strong minded people that had
> different opinions on many matters. due to the governance rules that we
> setup and created and the way in which we managed the project it was
> hard to mitigate these problems.

Not true. You had the power, yet you didn't use it. You could have called  
for a vote but you did not.

> the reason for not involving everyone at the start is pretty simple and
> nerdy. when the idea came up we just looked at who was the most active
> in the various software trees the last 6 months and proposed our idea to
> the 5 most active core devs and power users. it was a simple choice of
> numbers and perceived activity. the feedback was rather overwhelming and
> things just picked up a certain momentum leading to the status quo. i
> guess the excitement for fixing long standing issues just took over.

Sure, playing democracy is easy if only the ones you agree on have the  
right to be included in decisions.

> i have been asked by luka why we consider this a reboot rather than a
> fork. i actually had to think about that one. a fork for me means that
> one party splits with a second. that was not our intent. we wanted to
> split with the errors we have done ourselves in the past and the wrong
> management decision that were made at times. the gap between core
> developers, power users and endusers had grown way too big. hence i
> consider this more a “We are forking ourselves” or as we put it,
> rebooting the system.

Again, as RM and LD, plus having the right to call a vote you had all the  
power you could need to make these changes in openwrt. Even the ones you  
turned down but introduced as modernization in LEDE.

> to sum it up, my personal reasoning why i endorse this … the now 20 year
> olds like social media, github, clouds and what nots. for me to continue
> shaping a development and political system that they should use in their
> future to run on their routers when i am already double their age is not
> ideal. the next generation should be given the freedom to shape their
> own future and learn from their mistakes the same way we shaped our
> future and learned form our mistakes. i sincerely hope that the reboot
> will encourage people to step up and not only have good ideas of what
> should be fixed but will start to shape their future themselves

This is so full of political pr it makes me remember "make America great  
again"..



Imre
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