Damien Zammit

Libreboot Screwup - 18 Sept 2016

libreboot

As one of the main "contributors" to the Libreboot project, I was contracted to work on two chipsets by Minifree.

Given the recent kerfuffle, and in spite of my vested interest in wanting to continue being paid to continue this important work, I find it necessary to spell out a couple of facts I find important about the libreboot project and the libreboot community:

1) I have recently noticed that Leah Rowe is the only person who has git commit access to the website, libreboot.org, and also the only person who has git commit access to the codebase, which has only become a problem recently.

2) The codebase is a deblobbed coreboot repository, with patches from libreboot contributors (but committed by Leah), and a bunch of install scripts for ease of use.

3) We (the contributors) are not consulted about any of the views expressed on the libreboot.org website when they are hastily published by Leah.

So, whenever you read "We believe...." or "We say that..." on the lists and websites, Leah has ultimate control of the libreboot project currently. It is clear that this person has been misusing control of the project to spew out irrelevant personal opinions on behalf of the "libreboot community", a singleton group of people consisting of ... yes you guessed it, Leah Rowe.

I am embarrassed by Leah's unprofessionalism, and the handful of us (who are too time-poor to maintain libreboot) a.k.a the *actual* libreboot community, will agree with me when I say that Leah has behaved highly inappropriately with regard to leading the libreboot project by:
- mixing personal views with the administration of the project on behalf of others,
- misrepresenting personal views to be the views of a whole community
as demonstrated by countless references to "We" and Phoronix' post regarding "*their* statement" (apparently libreboot's) ("We" never made any such statement(s), but Leah did.)
- censoring the IRC channel like a child when comments are made that are disagreed with
- posting irrelevant personal views on the project website

-- Damien Zammit (CC BY-ND)