Re: "Why I am retiring from contributing to FreeBSD"

On Tue, 30 Dec 2025, at 08:59, Edward Tomasz Napierała wrote:
> 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.

Hi Edward

I want to acknowledge your significant code contributions to FreeBSD
over the years. And yet, those contributions do not legitimise your
extraordinary email above.

As a long-standing policy, common to almost every community I have
been involved in, tech or not, core@ does not publically comment
extensively on code of conduct issues. This encompasses both your
specific situation, and the one you've linked to.

All I will say is that finding a useful, meaningful, and productive
response to code of conduct issues is extremely difficult, and
to do so in a way that facilitates positive changes in behaviour,
is even more so. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we are
unsuccessful.

Working through conduct@ issues has taken up, for better or worse,
almost all of our core term's time in 2025. I would like, for 2026,
to spend that time on things that are constructive for the whole
community.

Given that you do not have all the information on the issue you
linked to, I would encourage you to step back & consider whether
your speculation is serving you, the project, and our community,
well.

I wish you a better 2026, 
Dave Cottlehuber
on behalf of core@