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

FOSS always devolves into the Tyranny of the Beta Male.

It’s some kind of unwritten law of nature.

On Thu, Jan 1, 2026 at 9:17 AM Karl Denninger <karl@denninger.net> wrote:

> (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
> *The Market Ticker*
> *[S/MIME encrypted email preferred]*
>