Hi all, Couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to the open source community which I spent the most time mingling besides my previous company work. As many of you already know, I left the firmware field and thus 9elements to pursue my own startup.
What a bizarre community with many interesting and great people, who I have grown to know many of you personally throughout the journey. In the end, I wish for the best of coreboot from the bottom of my heart, and hopefully it will be the de-factor firmware standard for providing much better quality and services compared to the existing solutions… Firmware world is a mess, and the introduction of coreboot came in as a spring water flows in some of very best devices in the world, and it just boot without much complications! Firmware should be simple and free the users from proprietary control!!!
Always believed in coreboot, and will always vouch for you all :) Thank you for creating a very welcoming open source community that I had a lot of fun (and also some hard) times with ;)
Best Regards, Sheng
P.S: Any coreboot forks (whatever you called it Masharo or Pipapo), please pay your due in upstreaming your changes back to the main coreboot branch - especially for those companies who are having good profits (you know who you are) but refuse to actively contributing back to the community: maybe I will still come after you if I have too much free time; unless be a good boy and stop leaching for greed and profits, after all you are taking big advantage of the hard work from all the community members. Have some dignity.
On Sat, 2025-01-11 at 00:07 +0000, LEAN SHENG TAN wrote:
Thank you for creating a very welcoming open source community that I had a lot of fun (and also some hard) times with ;)
And you decided to leave in the most childish, unprofessional and toxic way while you want to teach others about "being a good boy" and dignity? And you think this is motivating anyone to participate in the project? What the hell?
This is nothing else than toxic and hilarious.
So here is my goodbye to you. I've just removed you from the coreboot core developers group. I don't think you will need that again. This behaviour is not expected by any core developer.
Bye.
Felix
My dear Felix, Unless you are Felix the Great or something, I doubt that you have the right to simply remove someone from core developer role, even coreboot leaders have to follow certain process to do it.
So try not to make a scene here by publicly breaching of community’s trust on you due to personal grudges ;)
Peace, Sheng
On 14. Jan 2025, at 08:13, Felix Singer felixsinger@posteo.net wrote:
On Sat, 2025-01-11 at 00:07 +0000, LEAN SHENG TAN wrote:
Thank you for creating a very welcoming open source community that I had a lot of fun (and also some hard) times with ;)
And you decided to leave in the most childish, unprofessional and toxic way while you want to teach others about "being a good boy" and dignity? And you think this is motivating anyone to participate in the project? What the hell?
This is nothing else than toxic and hilarious.
So here is my goodbye to you. I've just removed you from the coreboot core developers group. I don't think you will need that again. This behaviour is not expected by any core developer.
Bye.
Felix
Hey guys,
this is escalating beyond what is reasonable.
The original email might have some questionable wording (I personally did not like the use of "being a good boy"), but from the overall tone I did not get the feeling it was meant to be taken as dead-serious.
In my humble opinion, you two are now making a mountain out of a molehill (exaggerate a small problem or issue into something much larger or more significant than it actually is).
Sheng, I have hoped you would try to de-escalate, and instead you add oil to fire. Please let's not fight because of poor wording.
Best, Vojtech V.
On 2025-01-15 16:13, LEAN SHENG TAN wrote:
My dear Felix, Unless you are Felix the Great or something, I doubt that you have the right to simply remove someone from core developer role, even coreboot leaders have to follow certain process to do it.
So try not to make a scene here by publicly breaching of community’s trust on you due to personal grudges ;)
Peace, Sheng
On 14. Jan 2025, at 08:13, Felix Singerfelixsinger@posteo.net wrote:
On Sat, 2025-01-11 at 00:07 +0000, LEAN SHENG TAN wrote:
Thank you for creating a very welcoming open source community that I had a lot of fun (and also some hard) times with ;)
And you decided to leave in the most childish, unprofessional and toxic way while you want to teach others about "being a good boy" and dignity? And you think this is motivating anyone to participate in the project? What the hell?
This is nothing else than toxic and hilarious.
So here is my goodbye to you. I've just removed you from the coreboot core developers group. I don't think you will need that again. This behaviour is not expected by any core developer.
Bye.
Felix _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list --coreboot@coreboot.org To unsubscribe send an email tocoreboot-leave@coreboot.org
Unfortunately this email somehow landed in my drafts instead of on the mailing list..
However, I want to apologize for the way I've reacted and responded last week. It was inappropriate.
Best wishes to Sheng on his next step.
Felix
Hi Sheng, Couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to the open source community which I spent the most time mingling besides my previous company work. As many of you already know, I left the firmware field and thus 9elements to pursue my own startup. Thank you for the efforts you put into the coreboot project. We wish you a good start in your next adventure. P.S: Any coreboot forks (whatever you called it Masharo or Pipapo), please pay your due in upstreaming your changes back to the main coreboot branch - especially for those companies who are having good profits (you know who you are) but refuse to actively contributing back to the community: maybe I will still come after you if I have too much free time; unless be a good boy and stop leaching for greed and profits, after all you are taking big advantage of the hard work from all the community members. Have some dignity.
We have to contradict this statement.
Though we all love open source and an upstreaming approach would be the ideal one, we understand that there are people or companies out there who cannot follow this in the first place. The reasons for this vary a lot, depending on many factors like customer commitments, time to market and restricted access to required assets. Therefore, having a development on behalf of a coreboot distribution can still be beneficial to the coreboot project itself as in the end it is still coreboot and GPL. And it witnesses even a healthy ecosystem if there are multiple distributions of the core project available, as this proves the interest in the core project (i.e. coreboot). Often, features and patches developed for a distribution will find their way back into upstream if the circumstances change later (e.g. the SoC in question and/or its documentation is now publicly available). Because even the distributions do benefit if the amount of patches they have to maintain is limited compared to the latest upstream.
Therefore, the coreboot project does not discourage any party from driving their own development under the GPL hood for their needs and provides coreboot support for current devices. And if these parties can make a business with this approach, this is fine. Having diversity was always a good indication for a healthy approach, just have a look at the Linux ecosystem.
Sincerely,
your coreboot project leadership
-
David Hendricks -
Felix Singer -
LEAN SHENG TAN -
Vojtech Vesely