[Ksummit-discuss] TAB non-nomination

James Bottomley
2018-11-09T00:04:05Z

Hi All,

Several people have asked me to stand again for election to the TAB, so
I thought I'd give a general explanation of why that isn't going to
happen. For background: I was one of the people who lead the charge in
getting the Linux Foundation predecessor OSDL to create the TAB to give
developer input into what was then seen as a body trying to speak for
the Linux Kernel. I was actually TAB chair for 8 years from 2006 to
2014. The job of the TAB, as I saw it, was to solve a lot of the
political friction issues around the places where the Linux Kernel
community interfaces with the Linux Foundation and Industry and in
those 8 years I gained quite a lot of expertise in political relations
trying to do that.

However, TAB member and TAB chair aren't roles people are born to fill,
they're roles people have to grow into. What our community needs is
more people willing to grow into these roles to ensure effective
succession and if I stepped into one I'd be denying others that
opportunity, which would be bad both for succession planning and the
growth of the community in general.

I think the reason I'm getting these requests is angst over this CoC
debate, so I'll go so far as to detail my political instincts over this
below ... if you've no interest in politics (as most of you won't have)
stop reading now. If you are interested, perhaps you should consider
standing for the TAB yourself.

James

---

The biggest political mistake was actually doing anything with the
Linux Kernel CoC at all. The object was to deflect a highly
unfavourable article in the New Yorker. With hind sight, that could be
achieved simply by Linus' personal apology, statement that he was
stepping aside and going for assistance to understand others' emotions.

Hind sight, though is always perfect. At the time, as a TAB member,
all you saw was a panic driven by both Linus and the Linux Foundation
that we needed an updated Kernel CoC ASAP, like today. Panic is very
infectious so it can be extremely difficult in these circumstances to
stand up and say "stop, we need more information" ... and if you think
you'd be the one always to demand more information remember that
there's a time a decision has to be made and it always passes before
you can get complete information, so you'd basically be rendering the
TAB indecisive and useless. Recognising when it's time to stop and ask
for more data and when you have to make decisions with what you have is
a key political skill.

The second mistake was picking the wrong CoC. I'm not talking about
the wording, which has been discussed on this list, but the politics
surrounding the choice: The original author of the current CoC was
unsupportive to the point of attacking the kernel community in public.
That drove a huge amount of me too attacks plus an equally large amount
of anti-me too hysteria and lead to enormous external awareness and
friction plus a not inconsiderable amount of unwelcome personal email
to various people. This could largely have been avoided by either
evolving our existing CoC through a community process or by picking a
CoC whose original author would be willing to stand up and be
supportive of our desire to change.

The third mistake was dumping the fully formed CoC and a later update
into the tree with little to no community input which has generated a
lot of obvious anger within our community itself. All I'll say on this
is that revisiting the CoC is going to cause another huge cascade of
externally driven attacks which I think we'd all rather avoid, so if
you're still ticked, then perhaps you should channel that anger and
stand for the TAB ...