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

Hi trasz,

I am sad to see you stepping down as a contributor. Your work has been incredibly important to the project and we respect our decision to stop contributing. All I hope is you are not using this broadcast  as an excuse to create some drama. 

It is clear to me you have never been on the other side of the argument trying to deal constant complaints coming from all sides. Let alone the lack of empathy from your side. The core has been dealing with CoC issues **most of their time**.
Do you know how hard their job is?

Playing a "victim" is an extremely convenient role, everyone immediately has to apologize to you and explain themselves in the most humiliating way because your feelings may have been hurt. The position of a typical victim is always anti-establishment. Core is bad and shady, members are lying genocide perpetrators and poor little developer is always kicked to the curb by a soulless corporate machine, nazis and literal hitlers are around every corner.. 
Victimhood mentality is sad one - the only way a victim can attract attention to itself is to scream ever louder about how hurt it is, use ever-louder words like "fascism" and "genocide". My grand parents survived the Holodomor in the 30s and then WW2 and and another post-war famine in the 40s. None of you know what real genocide of fascism is, and pray to god you never will. 

In the same way you know very little about people on the core and what core has to deal with. You are enjoying the privilege of not being responsible for anything that the core does and so you are quick to judge them. "Mishandling an incident"- the words you use mean that it was not resolved to *your* liking, because, of course, only you know what is best, right? I met many present and former core and foundation members in person, some of them I closely work with. They are not evil, they are a just humans trying to do their best. And they are given one of the shittiest jobs - the one that always leaves a lot of people unhappy, no matter what they do. 

The last thing a responsible community member does is brings out dirty laundry and starts stirring the pot, or worse - with the lack of anything concrete starts pointing fingers to "others" and making accusations.
Incidents, complaints, conflicts have to be resolved in private. This is what civilized communities do. But it may be hard to see from the vantage point of a victim because "I am hurt and therefore they all owe me and I can do what I want" mentality is rooter in anarchy.
> This whole mechanism is fundamentally broken, yet we refuse to acknowledge that and instead continue the cargo cult.

It is true that "democracy" mechanisms are not perfect and by no means FreeBSD is a perfect system.  It is possible that that current government structure of the project can be improved. In a democracy you are free to express your opinion, and so you do.  But it doesn't mean any opinion is a valid one. In a project of a size of FreeBSD there will always be conflicting opinions. Your suggestion to bring them in the open is a populistic one as it appeals to  emotions. Sure, we can start publicly shitting on each other, but what then? "Activists" of this sort rarely think more than half-a-step ahead. Without concrete suggestions on how to make things better, and not better just for you, your criticism looks childish and unprofessional.
Brining dirty laundry in the open has historically never been not a good solution, why are you surprised that this behavior is not welcome? The very fact that you are broadcasting a drama of your voluntary decision to stop voluntarily contribution to the project means you are one of those activists who is desperate to grab some power by weaponizing the Code of Conduct. With this goal surely bringing more dirty laundry into the open serves your goals. 

Please do this somewhere else.






On Tue, Dec 30, 2025, at 12:59 AM, 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.
> 
> 
>