Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:59:08 +0000 From: Edward Tomasz =?utf-8?Q?Napiera=C5=82a?= <trasz@freebsd.org> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: "Why I am retiring from contributing to FreeBSD" Message-ID: <aVOUXGJsnyae4-ND@pustaq.ultrahub>
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Hi, I’m trasz@; over past two decades I wrote the iSCSI stack, and autofs(4), and rctl(8), and ZFS ACLs, and reroot, and some other bits, working for FreeBSD Foundation and now University of Cambridge. Currently I’m in a weird situation where FreeBSD core team (likely) won’t kick me out until I release the email archive documenting their mishandling of a certain incident, including them lying to my face to discourage me from speaking up about it. Or, they could kick me out for protesting against genocide in a way that hurt core team member’s income streams. Or because a YouTuber they like asked them to. We’ll know the official excuse once it happens :) This email is about something else though. Normally this would barely raise any eyebrows, but given current circumstances it deserves closer look: seems like core@ scared away another long time contributor: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=50102.0 The background - record of someone’s hurt feelings - can be found at: https://web.archive.org/web/20250616201452/https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=280701 Note that I don’t know the situation and so I’m not definitely claiming core is in the wrong here - just that it would be naive to blindly trust they are still doing the right thing, given recent history. The problem, as I see it, is that core@ has learned, consciously or not, that they can just ignore the developer community altogether. They don’t even bother answering emails at this point. Another committer declared that “the proper way is to elect better core team next time”. And so there is this fundamental problem that we grew attached to larping democracy with core elections. Real democracy depends on being able to criticise the elected team, which in FreeBSD is not currently allowed; any discussion on this topic gets immediately squashed. Democracy also requires transparency, which is something that we used to have, at least betwen core and developers, until the current core team “forgot about it”. This whole mechanism is fundamentally broken, yet we refuse to acknowledge that and instead continue the cargo cult. So, go read the links above, then ask core@ what happened there. Sorry I have to do it like this in public, but my previous, more private, attempts have all been ignored.home | help
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