[gPXE] Changes to Etherboot Project roles and responsibilities

[Marty Connor]

Michael,

I have taken a full week to respond on this matter to fully consider
and clearly communicate my thoughts.

I'll begin by reviewing the current situation, as I see it, and then
provide responses to your particular, recent claims to correct the
public record.  Finally I will give my decision regarding moving
forward.

After reflection and consultation, I repeat my decisions from last week:

 - You are no longer lead developer for the Etherboot Project and gPXE. You
   abandoned that position over nine months ago.

 - You may no longer commit to the main gPXE repository. That role is
   now part of a new development and review process that you've declared
   you will not follow. More notably, since the time I articulated this
   point in prior email, you have repeatedly demonstrated that you will
   not follow this review process and change in commit policy. This is
   unacceptable; the main gPXE tree is a resource for the entire
   project, not your personal tree.

 - You will not be assigned a student for our GSoC 2010 engagement.
   You have repeatedly neglected students you agreed to mentor.

== Responses to Recent Claims ==

Regarding the specific points made in your last email:

Michael Brown wrote on 3/21/10 4:36 PM:
> I'm not even going to dignify your ranting with a point-by-point
> demolition. However, there is one line that really angered me:
>
>> This was in addition to developing the concept of gPXE in the first
>> place,
>
> You didn't develop the "concept of gPXE". You chose the name "gPXE".
> That was, essentially, your sole technical contribution in the
> evolution from Etherboot to gPXE. That was all that you did.

Actually, I did a lot more than most people know, and you are using
what is not known publicly to suggest that I have done much less than I
have.

In 2004, over a year before I initiated a fork of Etherboot called gPXE, I
determined that the continued viability of Open Source network booting
required us to support the PXE industry standard.

Though this was a controversial direction, I believed Etherboot support
for PXE was sufficiently important that I decided to sponsor this
development myself. Having seen the quality of a couple of other
Etherboot extensions you had done, I contracted with you and paid you
$10,000 US to add PXE support to Etherboot. I did this from my own
pocket and did not ask you for joint copyright, only that the code be
GPL licensed.  Here is my announcement of that effort from 2004:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=78F7813C-3FFF-11D8-A9BF-0003934539EE%40etherboot.org

Few people were aware of my substantial funding of that effort. This
was fine with me; what mattered most to me was that Etherboot would
remain relevant as an Open Source network bootloader.

That extension of PXE into Etherboot proved the concept, but it quickly
became clear that the approach was severely constrained by being
embedded in Etherboot's custom and legacy technologies. If you recall,
you and I discussed this extensively at the time. With deliberation,
respect for the Etherboot community, and in full consultation with you,
I forked from Etherboot to start the gPXE project in 2005.  Shortly
afterward, the project leader for Etherboot resigned and I took over as
Etherboot project leader, and focused the project's development effort
on gPXE.

Here is a message from April 2005 where I assumed leadership of the
Etherboot Project and discussed how we would move forward:

   http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=e1f3555748849ba1f9e93e4c9f565b11%40etherboot.org

[ For those interested, here is a paper that contains a concise history of the
Etherboot Project:

   http://edgyu.excess.org/ols/2008/H%20Peter%20Anvin%20-%20x86%20network%20booting%3a%20integrating%20gPXE%20and%20PXELINUX.pdf ]

Though you have perhaps forgotten the details, you were involved in
deliberations throughout this period and knew about the substantial
work I was doing to sponsor this effort, promote you as the lead
developer, invigorate the supporting community, and clear obstacles and
objections to our endeavor. Since that time, I have remained project
leader for the Etherboot project, including gPXE, and have continued to
contribute project management, code, and support for improved
communication, promotion, and infrastructure. This has remained my role
when you have been actively involved in the project, and also during
your various absences over the past several years.

> I have for years sat quietly by and bitten my tongue at your ever more
> audacious attempts to claim credit for my work.  As I have confided to some
> of the other people on this list, this has been one of the primary reasons
> for my spending ever more time away from the project; indeed, last summer I
> was seriously considering announcing that I was quitting for good, because it
> was just too demoralising to carry on dealing with your ego.

It is my observation that you started communicating that my leadership
was a problem when I began to express concern that you were no longer
contributing reliably to the community aspect of the project, and when
I began to question some of your technical decisions. As an open source
project leader, these are my duties and I have consistently performed
them, however you may chafe when they are directed towards you.

I also have consistently given you public credit for being an
outstanding programmer and for being the primary software architect and
developer of gPXE. I have spent five years promoting the project and
traveling to trade shows and demos at my own expense, and as part of
that effort I have pushed significant commercial attention your way to
make sure you could be funded to continue gPXE development. I do not
regret this, given the growth in gPXE over that time, and have asked
for almost nothing in return except for mutual respect for each of our
roles and contributions, and that we communicate honestly and openly,
particularly when we disagree.

This is evidently not acceptable to you anymore.

>> Since you have repeatedly demonstrated that you are not interested in
>> working in a supportive, collaborative manner that respects all
>> members of the project, please fork or find another project to work on.
>
> As the person who actually developed gPXE, and who remains the majority
> copyright holder, I would say that the responsibility to fork is yours, if
> you wish to do so.

No.  Whatever copyrights you hold, all the source code is licensed
under the GPL. It is not your personal code; it is a FOSS resource.

I have contributed significantly to this project and have remained with
it consistently for five years, even through times when you have been
absent and it was not clear if you were ever returning. I see no reason
to fork the code to continue supporting the project as I have always
done.

If you now feel that you have insufficient control of the gPXE code
base, you are free to fork. I assume you may need this level of control
to better support your commercial interests. Though forking code is
typically not desired, it may be what you need to promote your vision
of this technology. If this causes you to have renewed enthusiasm for
contributing to Open Source state-of-the-art, this may turn out to be a
positive for FOSS.

When I forked gPXE from Etherboot, it was never an attempt to hurt the
original project;  I believed that the world could use a FOSS PXE
stack, and that together we could make it happen.  In other words,
though it involved a lot of work, I saw it as a positive change to move
the state of the art forward. As I believe we have done.

> I appreciate that you own the gpxe.{org,net,com} domains,
> as a result of your having initially chosen the name "gPXE".

As a result of a lot more than that.

> I would ask you to transfer ownership of these to me, for which I
> will pay a fair rate.

No.  The domains are not for sale.  You have copyrighted a large amount
of code in gPXE but that confers no claim to the name.  If it had not
been for my leadership and funding, there would have been no fork, no
PXE code in Etherboot, no gPXE, and you would therefore not find the
name as valuable.

> I appreciate that you also own the physical machine rom.etherboot.org;
> I am happy to transfer hosting to my own server.

No.  As I noted earlier, I have taken a week to think about this
situation and it is clear to me that you no longer are comfortable
working with me and will not participate in any process discussions
that limit your ability to control the source code of gPXE.

== Moving Forward ==

In light of your refusal to change your behavior, and because
continuing the current situation is unfair to other members of the
project, I have decided on the following course of action.

In two weeks, you will lose privileged access to all Etherboot Project
resources. Specifically, you will no longer have access to your account
on our main project server rom.etherboot.org, project server, and you
will lose administrative access on other project resources.

I am providing a two-week period before this deadline to give you time
to copy information to your own servers. Please do not delete
information from project resources.  It will only create work for
myself and others to restore it from backup media.

During this discussion I have not limited your access to project
resources in any way.  You have continued to have root access on the
main Etherboot Project server (rom.etherboot.org), and you have had
full access to most project infrastructure including email, wiki, and
IRC.

After this transition you may retain normal user access to some project
resources such as mailing lists, support site, wiki, and IRC, as long
as you do not attempt to disrupt them. I sincerely hope you will act
peacefully and responsibly and not make a difficult situation even more
difficult.

You may continue to work with the Etherboot Project, if you wish, as a
contributor but not in any official capacity.  Your patches will be
reviewed, discussed, and applied, if they are approved.  I sincerely
hope that you may remain a contributing member of our community, but I
will understand if you no longer wish to.

I take no pleasure in making this decision, and I would certainly not
normally announce it in public, but given the level of mis-information
that you have generated, I feel it is vital that there is transparency.

gPXE is a community asset, which I have given many years of my life to
keep viable and growing.  You are part of why gPXE is successful, but
certainly not the only reason, and during your extended absences I have
discovered that others can and will help support gPXE in a cooperative,
convivial, and technically sound manner.

I wish you well with whatever you decide to do.  You remain one of the
best programmers that I have ever had the privilege to work with, and I
wish we could have worked things out differently, but sometimes things
don't go the way we would prefer.

Be well.

/ Marty /