[zhongwei2049]

Classic pattern. The board gets populated by people whose main skill is board politics, and they use governance tools to push out the people who actually build the thing. Seen this happen in multiple open source foundations.

[khalic]

This is anecdotal at best, but it does play into the tired old technical vs non-technical simplification. The fact that the two entities have now become direct competitors is a better explanation grounded in facts

[Tuna-Fish]

Your explanation is also an oversimplification that leaves out a lot of key details.

TDF is ran by a board. The board is supposed to contain 10 people, it currently has 7. This board is expected to be elected by members on a regular schedule. The elections are late, because the rump board has twice delayed the elections. Instead of holding elections to fill out the board, the rump board chose to change the bylaws, through a legally questionable process (properly, they would have to hold a vote of trustees, but chose not to), to allow them to exclude people from voting in the elections. Then they use the new bylaws to exclude many of their political opponents, on very flimsy grounds⁰.

You don't need to even consider which side of this conflict is technical or non-technical to see that there is something rotten here.

0: And yes, the grounds are very flimsy indeed. Excluding people in case of active litigation sounds sensible, until you consider that the litigation was started by the TDF board, and is frivolous. Collabra is using the trademarks under valid license.

[khalic]

Fair points, I didn’t know about the legal tango from the TDF, circumventing processes to impose yourself is not the tool of the righteous usually

[harvey9]

I don't see it as trying to exclude non technical people, only that people who specialise in organisational politics will have a natural advantage over people who specialise in code so in the long run more of the former will sit on boards

[bawolff]

On the other side of things, i've seen plenty of examples where technical people try to manage things despite having no administration experience and screw it up.

[mont_tag]

That sounds like what happened at Boeing.