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

> (All elided, as my commentary is non-specific but rather pertains to 
> the root of the debate)

As a former CEO who's firm used FreeBSD as the "base" of our operations 
for the "back half" of its existence (1990s forward so yeah, that far 
back) never mind another open-source project (Postgres) which was the 
foundation of our customer-management system (yes, running on FreeBSD) 
and an occasional contributor by bug report with a patch, pull request 
or otherwise in the nearly three decades since (typically not taken up 
but that's ok; it just results in a "-dirty" source tree from which I 
build -- the most-recent of which is the vltime/pltime thing in rtadvd) 
I both appreciate the issues core@ deals with but also chuckle a bit at 
them.

Why the latter?

Because a large part of it is voluntarily self-inflicted and as a former 
person who sat in the left seat I've been there and (mostly) avoided 
that by deliberate decision.

When running MCSNet in Chicago, being a very diverse population base 
into which we sold services, I had all manner of bombardment by this 
group and that attempting to bring other than the mission of the firm 
into the game. Since we sold Internet access and some of the first web 
hosting anything off-target from that was by definition outside the 
company's mission statement.  All attempting same got told to stuff it, 
quite-forcefully in many instances.

Why?

Because accepting and permitting anything else to become part of what 
the firm "stood for" meant I was going to make someone angry and we had 
a hundred competitors, all of whom would love to "eat us" and our 
revenue stream -- quite literally.  Why would I ever want to 
deliberately "split the baby" (and thus the revenue) by doing that?  
People think that's not what will happen but they're always wrong;//it 
will always happen because when you cater to someone's particular 
political viewpoint you anger the folks on the other side.  The only 
"neutral" position is "there's none of that entertained here, ever" and 
then demonstrating through your actions that you mean it.  Thus if you 
were gay, straight, Catholic, atheist, Turk, Armenian (a big fight at 
the time) or whatever, including Martian, the answer to "get rid of this 
or that" was "no I will not, but you're welcome here too on exactly the 
same terms as everyone else."

Yes, some will go away angry that way but the irrational cannot be 
reasoned with and the rational will see, if you're consistent, that in 
fact the other guy who brings pressure the other way on whatever issue 
it is gets told to stuff it too.  The rational will appreciate this and 
those who are not will go somewhere else.

I had plenty to deal with on a daily basis trying to stay in front of a 
rapidly-evolving business and yes, politically-motivated garbage on the 
"upstream" side that impacted us, neither of which was under my 
control.  But what happened inside the firm as a result of how I set 
policy was under my control, and the good (or harm) that came from it, 
including the increased or decreased workload as one of the consequences 
was my responsibility whether I liked it or not.  I didn't always get it 
right, of course, but I always did get to eat the consequences. Before 
being a CEO I resigned from jobs in a few instances over exactly this 
sort of misalignment; as an employee all I had to work with was pleading 
my case and if rejected then the options were and are to suck it up if 
the compensation is worth tolerating what you believe is foolish or 
resign and go do something else.

In a volunteer organizational circumstance the same is the case; a 
person who is contributing in some way, brings an issue forward and 
feels they were mistreated has no obligation to continue and anyone 
arguing that they should or must is simply wrong.  The organization has 
the right to make its decision and if the contributor assesses that the 
decision was for other than legitimate technical or business reason and 
whatever intangible benefit they obtain by being a part of of the 
organization (e.g. personal pride in the contributions they make, etc.) 
no longer has a positive balance in their exclusive viewpoint they have 
every right to turn in their badge, such as it is, and walk off.

Software development and maintenance on other than pure meritocracy is 
always going to be non-optimal simply because the guy or gal you chase 
away with a political polemic or claim of "muh principles" might be the 
one who, either today or tomorrow, would have made a great contribution 
but for your decision. Angering half the world is IMHO never wise and if 
you think you get to choose which half and that the other is "lesser" in 
some way in terms of technical capacity you're at best only going to be 
right half the time because there is always another person somewhere in 
the world who is smarter or more-talented than you and there is no way 
to know in advance if your position will make them happy or angry.

In some fields (e.g. running a political campaign) the entire point is 
to cater to a political or social view and any conduct contrary to that 
must be excised; there is simply no way around it since that's the 
entire point of the enterprise in question.  But is that ever true for a 
project that exists to further a high-quality operating system or, for 
the commercial space, to sell an entirely-neutral product or service on 
its face to anyone who brings money to the front desk and desires to buy 
same?

I argue not and thus any time an entity loses where the focus should 
reside the harm is self-inflicted just as many reading this likely did 
last night guzzling half a bottle of Gin -- and now is nursing a hangover.

My 2 cents, for what its worth.

-- 
Karl Denninger
karl@denninger.net
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