[mcv]

I hadn't heard about this drama before, but as I can piece things together, Leah has been maintaining Libreboot and another boot system for years. Denis and Adrien disagreed with Leah's decision to include binaries, created their own version of Libreboot without those binaries and published it under the same name on a very similar domain trying to claim the existing Libreboot name for their version.

Then I suspect Leah disagreed with that fork both on technical merits (it's based on old code) and with the stealing of the name, but she agreed with the need for a version without the binaries, so she made that and published it under the name GNUboot, intended for Denis and Adrien to base their work on, and now Denis and Adrien are complaining that she's misusing the GNU name.

Is that roughly a correct summary?

Because if it is, it sounds to me like both sides do have valid points, but handled the disagreement very poorly. Denis and Adrien complaining that Leah stole the GNU name when they just stole the Libreboot name, sounds very hypocritical. The whole thing would be a lot better if both sides stopped the drama and powergames and just worked together to create the best possible boot systems; one with the binaries and one without.

[b112]

I often wonder if someone is whispering in people's ears, to destroy such projects.

For example, a long email history on any of these people(and even if you don't use, people you email do use gmail), from a central store such as gmail, would provide immense insight into personality traits, etc.

Which means external motivaters could be used as handy leavers to drive dissent.

Little spats like this, erode project trust, and just divert energy.

Anyhow, no idea if this is happening. I guess if you really do want to destroy something, just let Oracle buy it, so maybe I'm off here.

[toyg]

Most FOSS projects are unpaid, and the only reward is nerd-fame. That's why maintainers are often petty about credits and "ownership".

[wlerin]

Seems like a faster route to destruction would be letting Elon buy it.

But yeah, this does seem to happen painfully often. The particulars of this specific incident remind me a lot of the FFmpeg vs LibAV split (or the LibAV+Debian vs. FFmpeg+Everyone Else split).