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Why?

Github: Tollef Fog Heen

Project: systemd

Date: 11-16-2014

Who?

Our contributor talks about being outted from their “tribe,” systemd in their blog post. As a little bit of background information on tribes our contributor says,

Debian and its various maintainer teams are a bunch of tribes (with possibly Debian itself being a supertribe). Unlike many other situations, you can be part of multiple tribes. I’m still a member of the DSA tribe for instance. Leaving pkg-systemd means leaving one of my tribes.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t just a choice that our contributor made, as they claim it’s more forced than anything else.

It hurts even more because it feels like a forced exit rather than because I’ve lost interest or been distracted by other shiny things for long enough that you don’t really feel like part of a tribe.

Later on they describe why they were forced out of their tribe, and sadly it’s due to constant hostility from the community.

Now, how did I, standing stout and tall, get forced out of my tribe? I’ve been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm, shouldn’t I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the rain. It’s not a single hurtful comment here and there. There’s a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence.

This ultimately led them disengaging from the project.

This morning, I resigned as a member of the systemd maintainer team. I then proceeded to leave the relevant IRC channels and announced this on twitter.