Hello,
There was a recent port that was made to Libreboot for the Dell Optiplex 9020 MT, and I was not properly credited for the work that I did. I made a pull request on Codeberg with my patch (github basically) and labeled it as ‘WIP’. Leah and I were working on this together during that time, and I was told to wait a week, so I did. Time passes and guess what? They closed off my patch and added it themselves a week later with no credit given to me.
I made the .ROM files for the 9020 MT motherboard, I tested them, and they didn’t work until Leah came in and resized the IFD and GBE regions. That was all that they did. Everything else, I did on my own, I added the entries in /vendor/sources for MRC/ME, and added it to lbmk. Leah is now refusing to accept my patch that’s fixed.
I’m not trying to steal all the glory from them, they did help, I just want partial credit for utilizing the port from coreboot gerit. This port was originally made in Coreboot by Mate Kukri, so work mostly goes to them, but as for adding support for Libreboot, my name is completely left out. I just feel wronged because now they’re saying that I don’t deserve to have my name on this because I was too slow, when the reality is I was literally instructed to wait for them during that time period. I believe I was manipulated into waiting so that Leah could get the board themselves and add it without ever including my name. They also told me to wait a week on two seperate occasions, so in total I waited two weeks.
I spent a week working on this, and I let them know how significant this was to me, only to have my work shitted on and not properly credited. I’m now banned from IRC and Libreboot for talking about this on Mastadon. Leah claims that I was bullying/harassing them, but I was just exerting frustration, and if it was bullying, I apologize then.
Leah told me on Mastadon to ‘respect their authority’ and ‘yield to their authority’ and not to make a peep about this. I’m just ranting about this now because I feel like my work was just stolen. This is the most powerful desktop supported by Libreboot and now I’m left in the back pages where no one can see my name, which says ‘Provided testing hardware for the 9020 MT’ when I did much more than just testing. I was the one who added support for this desktop. I’ve been a fan of the Libreboot project for 4 years, this just makes me really sad to see it end like this.
I’m sorry to hear about this, do you have some links to your GitHub and the interactions?
EDIT: I checked Leah’s Mastodon, found this interaction: https://files.catbox.moe/6dftac.png https://mas.to/@libreleah/111997718668105706 And here’s the IRC interaction: https://av.vimuser.org/lorenzo.txt
https://libreboot.org/contrib.html#lorenzo-aloe
I haven’t taken the time to read all of this fully, simply trying to share info that is not supplied by either parties.
EDIT: Taking more time to read it, it seems so far:
OP’s code was buggy and bricking boards. Leah requested a patch to solve the known problems. OP took too long, and when Leah got a personal copy of the same computer/board, she worked on her patch and implemented it. OP is still listed on the site. https://libreboot.org/contrib.html#lorenzo-aloe
Provided hardware testing for the Dell OptiPlex 9020, also provided testing for proxmox with GPU passthrough on Dell Precision T1650, confirming near-native performance; with this, you can boot operating systems virtually natively, performance-wise, on a Libreboot system in cases where that OS is not natively supported.
All round good guy, an honest and loyal fan.
I personally have not written any code nor submitted anything to Libreboot, but it seems OP is still credited despite the claims of being stolen. I can’t confirm if any code was used by OP or if Leah used 100% original code, as that’s not my expertise. And even then, I’m not sure if the GPL/whatever license Libreboot uses is cool or uncool on that.
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when I was really just frustrated
Buddy that all reads as harassing. The IRC logs are especially a bad look for you, because you said:
im looking to add this board to my resume
And now that entire chat log is tied to it.
I’m not sure why you thought hounding someone and harping about it for nearly eight hours on IRC was a good idea. But now you’ve come to the Fediverse to find some absolution or something.
You can be frustrated, that’s fine, but when that frustration turns into that long of a hanging on the bell that’s evident in that chat log and then two hours later you came here with this, that is past frustration.
Leah also indicated:
if i give in to you now, you will try to harass/abuse me again in the future.
And Leah has a point. You’ve shown no sign of taking a moment to collect yourself. I get you are upset. Sometimes the best way to handle upset is to just shut up for a day or two. And trust me, I struggle with doing that myself.
Like everything you’ve done in your frustration, I’ve been down that road. And I’m pretty sure in your head you are telling yourself, but the difference is that… because that’s exactly what I’d say to someone telling me this. That my situation is different somehow and that I must rectify this injustice immediately!
and if it was bullying, I apologize then.
What you need to do is two things. One, learn from this so that in the future you can do… Two, chill out. I think you’ll find in more professional environments sorry is okay, but I have learned from my mistakes and will do better is more preferred.
This whole thing could have been max three messages on IRC. “Why wasn’t I credited? What was wrong with my submission? How do I improve going forward?” The end.
I think the biggest thing here for me is that in open projects, leads are fielding multiple people and working on their stuff. Every message you send is “Hey stop what you are doing and pay attention to me!” So you really want to be respectful of their time by really trying to be succinct on whatever is bugging you.
And you are on the contrib page.
All round good guy, an honest and loyal fan.
And I think you’re wondering how “testing” vs “developed” looks on your resume? But that chat log is now going to be front and center no matter what’s said on the contrib page. It really doesn’t matter if you got “developed” pasted on the contrib page.
All of this Mastodon interactions and IRC logs isn’t a good look. It’s not the end of the world. I think everyone has felt frustration like this before, like there’s some magical set of words to say that’ll fix everything. But you’ve got to let it go. You’re just digging down with posts like this. And you don’t have to let it go forever, just you’ve really added a lot of friction to have this go surface of the sun warm. You need to let it cool, come back refreshed, and maybe see if you can repair the relationship you have with the team.
But you’ve got to understand. Your post here paints one picture and your interactions with Leah on Mastodon and IRC are something else. And that difference between the is especially not good as it comes off as a lot of sour and bitterness on this “slight” that you perceived as such an injustice.
And hell’s bells. If you sit on this for seventy-two hours and you still feel massively wronged, go fork you a project and call it FOSSITboot or whatever and show everyone your prowess. If you’ve got skills to pay the bills, then if you build it they will come.
Lots of love for you, but just take a moment from everything. I assure you, it’ll do you wonders to decompress.
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And just so we’re clear, I’m not saying everything Leah said is golden. Humans are human and say things that don’t jive 100% of the time. It’s entirely possible for something to have both folks handle a situation in a manner that is less than ideal. All I’m indicating is for you to step back for a second. It will absolutely help you out here.
Ideally you can perhaps look at this from Leah’s point of view. But that’s solely up to you. Best thing for you though is to just bring it down a notch. That’s the only thing that I’m pretty sure is a good idea right now. What’s past that, I think only you can best determine that. But I honestly think some deep breaths are what’s immediately needed.
I’m pretty sure post that you’ll have it handled. And I don’t know how old you are but I’ll say that panicked hyping a situation only gets worse as you age. So developing ways to deal with it is just part of growing up for 30 to 50 year olds. This notion that we’re done “growing” at some magical number is bunk.
I had my car start stuttering on the highway once and thought for sure that I was going to die. My brain just spiraled a situation where I needed to just pull over and see what was wrong into a flight or fight response. Ultimately, it was just a loose hose and I fixed it. But for a moment there I was panicking myself way past a point of being reasonable.
It just happens and sometimes we just need to force ourselves to take a pause. That’s all the advice I think I can give you here. I think once you chill for a bit, you’re smart enough to figure out the what’s next part.
I know nothing of coding.
From pictures, I get that you submit a code, which didn’t work. You were told that you have a week to fix the code, and in the meantime they closed your patch and a fix was used.
Issue here is that you claim the fix was still your code … and they said its their own code.
How to prove that?
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Yes, you mentioned that multiple times in your communication with Leah.
However, we have no way of confirming the patch they use is the same one that you submit (have you submited? from communication it sounds like you have a week to provide a patch and then they just patch it themselves).
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From what I’ve read so far your code was too buggy, Leah then rewrote it (from scratch, as you just said) and then submitted her own code. What’s the problem? You even got a “All round good guy” on the contrib page (Also: Hi Brodie :))
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Feel like this should be included here. I’m pretty sure I found the original pr. I couldn’t find an associate issue so I’m not sure where the miscommunication about waiting happened.
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Look, from the exchanges between you and Rowe that Queue posted it seems that you did a lot of voluntary work that unfortunately wasn’t accepted or used. Rowe makes it pretty clear in the Mastodon conversation that your patch didn’t work and they decided they could make their own quicker. You did however get credit for testing.
I do understand the disappointment that hours of work didn’t prove successful but you may need to accept that and move on. I only see poor communication here, on both parts, not appropriating credit for others’ work.
Making wild claims that your work was stolen is… not a good look and just shows an inflated perception of your part in the process, tbh.
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I’m kind of confused. What work did they take? From the communications, it looks like you wrote some code, it wasn’t accepted, and Leah wrote their own implementation, from scratch. Is that not true? Unless they based their work off your code somehow, I don’t see how anything was stolen, potential dickishness from the maintainer aside.
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If they recreated it from scratch though, I don’t see what was stolen. Unless they incorporated your implementation somehow, I can’t see how this rises to stealing. There can be many competing implementations towards the same spec, and using one over the other is not necessarily theft.
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But was the code they wrote substantially identical to yours? Was what they claimed credit for your work just modified, or did they write an entirely new port that only bears resemblance?
If its the latter, you got the exact amount of credit you deserved. I’m not going to argue that their conduct was professional (though, neither was yours), but they don’t have any obligation to credit you further.
No, you say repeatedly that “you feel” it was stolen, “you feel” manipulated — and that’s fair, but would it stand up in court?
I see no evidence for your claims, only your feelings. Nowhere do you show how your unique code is used in the released patch that Rowe wrote. I’m sorry man, as I see it ATM there just isn’t any “there” there.
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Some maintainers on large open source projects really think credit is not a big deal and sometimes apply the changes sent to them as their own commit if they think it’s not too significant. I think this is wrong though. Even small contribution should be properly attributed or it’ll discourage future participation.
I just feel wronged because now they’re saying that I don’t deserve to have my name on this because I was too slow when I was only given a week and was literally told to wait during that time period.
This is very concerning if true.
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Yikes.
Yeah, looks like she think your work is not a big deal and aren’t worth the fuzz about it. Sadly this attitude is pretty common. The maintainer didn’t think they do anything wrong (it’s just a small config!), not realizing the work they think was easy and not worth the credit might not actually that easy for new contributors and perhaps warrant some credit or acknowledgement to encourage future contributions.
What’s even more ironic is that a contributor was banned. Under the GNU and FSF sibling organization, it is very difficult to get fellow developers to work on your project. Terrible communication skills on their part.
I felt like I knew this name “Leah Rowe” somewhere from my memory, until I realized that this person has a lot of online beef. If their past actions point out to them being rude, toxic and disingenuous, I think you should not stay in that company.
Think of the ban as a blessing, and focus your energy on some other project where you are valued.
Libreboot is actually not a GNU project anymore due to a dispute between Leah Rowe and the FSF.
Leah has said some dumb stuff but I think this particular separation from the GNU project was the correct decision. The dogmatic no blobs approach wasn’t working, it is better to reduce/minimise the binary blobs and support more devices imo. Don’t agree with their previous actions though.
Ironic
I am aware of that, but I should have phrased that better. What I meant was organizations related to GNU/FSF in some way or the other.
Best comment. Rowe has a lot of toxic history, and it is best to work in a separate lane rather than bolstering something like this.
OP’s testimony should serve as a lesson and a record for other firmware developers.
What a fucking rollercoaster. I don’t see why someone would ban someone that added a lot to a project. Stealing credits is incredibly low and sad.
I’m sorry this happened to you :/
So far, it seems:
OP made a patch, it was bricking a system and was told to fix it, but was slow to submit a fix. Leah then got the board, made her own patch, and then tested it without any bricks. OP is still listed in the credits. https://libreboot.org/contrib.html#lorenzo-aloe
It appears as if the original developer was told to wait for weeks
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I don’t see why someone would ban someone that added a lot to a project
No, exactly. Someone wouldn’t, and there is not a lot to show that OP added more than a lot of code that didn’t work. 🤷
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Exactly. According to their replies to you on Mastodon, Rowe found a fix of their own that solved the problem faster than going through the process with you.
Your work wasn’t stolen, it wasn’t even used
There is an obvious disconnect between your perception of the work process and Rowe’s, and that probably led to the miscommunications. You saw the collaboration as an informal deal that your work would be nursed through debugging to a workable version. Rowe, being the project lead, wanted any solution that would run on the device; found one and wrote it themself. To them the focus is not on helping make your personal contribution work, it’s on shipping LibreBoot with device patches that do.
I’m not a developer but I’ve been in both positions as a volunteer, a freelancer, and as a project manager. Sometimes you get passed over, sometimes you have to let contributors go who either don’t deliver the expected results or don’t deliver on time.
And yes, I’ve had to field long conversations, sometimes public ones, with people frustrated that their work has been rejected. Frankly, that’s not the reason anybody gets into project management. It drains energy you’d rather pour into the actual work.
The way you’ve brought this to Rowe on IRC, then on Mastodon, and now to Lemmy as a public grievance after they made it clear that they wouldn’t engage with your complaint any more — I don’t blame them for blocking you. It’s clear that you’re more concerned about your bruised ego than about the larger project, its importance to open computing — and the fact that there is now a functioning patch for your device.
I’m trying to put this nicely because, as I said, I’ve been in your position too (or similar), but I wouldn’t work with someone who reacts this poorly to rejection. Coming out with baseless accusations against Rowe about stealing your work is a huge red flag to potential collaborators that you’re the problem in the equation.
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I do feel sorry for you but not for the reasons you seem so obsessed about. I’ve been unemployed and trying to make opportunities for myself that didn’t come through. I’ve felt like I burned my one and only chance, several times. It’s rough pulling yourself up by the small hairs and trying again, but trust me. This isn’t the way.
This was intentional from Leah and it’s pretty obvious.
It’s obvious to you in your current situation, I’m sure, but take a breath and distance yourself just a moment. You’re clearly hurt but this is the makings of a paranoid delusion. Is the lead of an open source project intentionally persecuting and exploiting random volunteers, or just you specifically? Is that lead of an open source project with us in the room now?
Look, counterpoint: It’s fairly clear to me that you put a lot of expectation and hope on this opportunity to ship a working patch, and you saw the collaboration with Rowe as a sort of mentoring relationship where they’d coach your patch through to a working state. And after that you’d have that on your CV and all the doors to employment would open.
However, your work was (not stolen but) rejected — and you have been given clear explanations why the project lead chose not to use your work, not least that it bricked the device it was made for.
You need to acknowledge two things, both of them starting with “this isn’t all about you”: 1. Rowe had a different understanding of your collaboration, where they as a project lead were more concerned with shipping a working patch, any working patch, than with tutoring your process; and 2. The fault is with you for expecting Rowe to delay shipping and not use a fix they came up with themself in favour of your work. You handed in a patch that didn’t work and Rowe looked for other solutions as any good project manager should. End of.
You’ve seen an opportunity fall away and, although that is always a blow to someone starting a career, you need to move on. At this point you’re just tilting at windmills and making up reasons that somebody else is to blame. Nobody stole your work (not in a way that you seem willing to prove), you were given credit to the extent that your work was useful to the project.
Now do what you would have done if your work had been accepted: put the credit on your resume, keep looking for work and — I hope — more voluntary software work.
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Yes, I saw the lines you repeated over and over again. I’m starting to see why Rowe blocked you.
Your next big project should be to step away from the keyboard and get the fuck to work on yourself. Your egomania is the problem here, nobody owes you anything.
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If what Leah writes is correct, they didn’t steal your work because they created their own patch from scratch.
It seems they wanted to get the 9020 working as quickly as possible, probably because they seem to be selling these machines with Libreboot pre-flashed on their minifree.org website.
But Leah could’ve just fixed whatever didn’t work yet with your patch if they didn’t want to wait for you to get around to fix these apparent issues yourself. That’s how I usually experience how contributions go. Make a pull request, and if something is still blocking it from getting merged, someone (either the PR author (you in this case), a project maintainer (Leah in this case) or whoever) fixed outstanding issues so it can be merged. Both authors usually get credited in this case.
If your code was so messy - and I’m in no way trying to say it was, I didn’t even look at it, but if it was - that redoing the work was easier than fixing your work, then it isn’t actually your contribution that’s in the production codebase after all. So, technically, you’d be correctly credited.
You should let it go either way to be honest. It’s not a good look for either of you. You’re harassing them via IRC and Mastodon (not personally attacking them, but constantly nagging), and Leah eventually writes they’ll ignore you, but then just straight up starts to insult you or your code like it was worthless all along.
I wouldn’t work with them again. Move on.
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I understand the frustration get how annoying it is but I also can see it from leah perspective. Honestly I think this is a misunderstanding and I don’t think anyone is trying to be toxic (at least not initially. The your work was shit comment is rude af)
This may not be what you want to hear but I think you should consider whether all this argument and feeling bad is worth the potential upside. What happened was shitty but you shouldn’t let this ruin your day.
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Having had my work appropriated by others before, I can feel you. I’d like to hope that this is all a big misunderstanding, but that would be naive of me. Hopefully this doesn’t stop you from contributing to other things in the future.
Since the content on codeburg is user owned and managed I’m afraid you don’t have much recourse there.
Just know that you are heard.
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Reading Leah’s comments, you’ve been credited for what you did, testing. Your patch didn’t work, she didn’t use it and wrote a solution herself.
Nothing was stolen because she didn’t use your patch.
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okay, still, she didn’t steal anything from you. She didn’t use your patch, that’s all that happened. That’s not stealing.
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There are countless patches that are never merged for one reason or another, sometimes just because the maintainer doesn’t like the implementation even if it works, so they implement it themselves.
If no code was used, no credit is necessary. She did credit you for testing, which a lot of projects don’t bother crediting. So take that and continue with your life.
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If I’m completely honest, after reading both your account and theirs, I don’t really understand why you’re this hung up about it.
It’s almost like you care more about credit than a port that actually works. I know you weren’t done/that it was a WIP, and they told you to wait, but at the end of the day it’s open software, and literally anyone could have beaten you to it.
I don’t think you’re wrong to feel that your efforts should have been represented more, but I honestly would have backed off like 10% through that conversation and just started working on something else. It’s not worth it man. I hope you can feel better about this whole situation soon.
Kinda embarrassing how few people consider that Leah, though rude, may have ever had any kinda point. Like, apparently this person spent eight hours harassing them on IRC (which is mentioned in this thread, no need to actually go check anything for oneself before demonizing somebody!) but ohhh noooo getting banned from the IRC channel is horrible how could they do that! What a monster!
Meanwhile, looks to me like everyone involved admits that, despite the libellous thread title, Leah Rowe did not steal this person’s work.
tl;dr: In this thread people skim a rant from one of two sides, call the other a monster. Grr.
2024-02-26 18:33:38 lorenzo i had went out of my way to buy that board, let you know about that this was what i wanted to do
2024-02-26 18:33:49 lorenzo i really wanted to see my name on adding this boardThey literally said they wanted to see their name by adding the board. It feels quite selfish to me to snatch the work a new contributor was doing just because they are ‘taking too long’ without contacting them first.
Read the irc fully after writing that and it seems there was already communication between them, so it’s even weirder that such miscommunication occurred.
On masto the maintainer wrote that op was harassing them and gave the irc log for proof, but the irc chat is peaceful until the end where the maintainer flips out about the masto post and accuses op of harassing on masto??
The end of the irc log:
2024-02-27 05:04:04 leah you have 2 choices
2024-02-27 05:04:25 leah * stop going online and publicly harassing me - delete all posts about it. and i’ll delete my replies to your mastodon just now
2024-02-27 05:04:48 leah * stop contributing to libreboot - i will refuse all patches from you, and i’ll ban you from #libreboot if you even raise a peep
2024-02-27 05:05:02 leah i’ve tried to be nice but it ends here, and i will listen no further. i won’t have you harassing me.
2024-02-27 05:05:11 leah yield to my authority, or fuck off. it’s your choice.
2024-02-27 05:06:17 leah i could give in to you- whet you’re asking for is unreasonable, and the manner in which you ask is more like a threat than a request. if i give in to you now, you will try to harass/abuse me again in the future.
2024-02-27 05:06:27 leah it’s your choice now. submit, or fuck off.It bites me that they call op harassing, threatening and abusive while threatening them of being banned if they talk publicly about it in the same breath. More adjectives from mastodon:
Your kind of bullying, coercive and controlling behaviour is unwelcome either in my life or in my communities.
Maybe ‘nagging’ could be an appropriate criticism, but the maintainer just looks out of it here. It’s also funny that they say “if i give in to you now, you will try to harass/abuse me again in the future” without realising that’s likely what op is also thinking at the moment
Go back to reddit and bootlick GitHub dev trackers with emoji reactions
I’d be pissed too. Not really anything I can do but let me know if I can help.
You deserve credit for work you did do, it’s especially important yet all too easy to overlook in the FOSS space.
Sorry to hear this happened to you.
Brother, that’s where the beauty of open source shines, if you wanna continue then fork their code and build upon it, remember tachiyomi or newpipe or vanced situations, they were just forked and continued, yeah, it’s not proper comparison since libreboot is still active but examples was discontinued, well… I have better example then, cataclysm: dda and it’s fork cataclysm: bn
I can understand a miscommunication from their part, but the latter treatment on Mastodon is not an attitude that a large FOSS project should have towards another person.
While I won’t pretend that I was ever going to contribute to Libreboot, if a project I loved treated contributors this way, at best I would never contribute, and at worst seriously reconsider using said project. Leah absolutely needs to apologise for this, and Libreboot needs to update its community standards.
