That being said, if the problem is that she would be a bad representative, the appropriate solution is for someone better to run against her and win the election. Eliminating the position suggests that the Linux Foundation doesn't trust the community to pick the "right" representative... and that says a lot about the situation.

That is why the sociopaths and busybodies "rise" to the top of any org, because those that started it all don't want to get involved in that (and will likely just pack up and move on if push comes to shove).

The idea that the linux community is dysfunctional and would elect a representative who wanted to push a particular political agenda at the expense of linux itself is sadly none too implausible.

1. Deny individual representation

2. ???

3. Governance problems fixed!

a plan (yeah, I'm being snarky, sorry).

For an in-depth argument from a Gnome board member on why this is a completely false accusation, see here: http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2015/09/13/outrageous-outreach/

(To be clear, I don't think their liabilities were ever in danger of exceeding their assets, but you can't pay wages and bills with a promise from Google to pay you money at some unspecified point in the future once it winds through their accounting process. I believe there was even some risk that they might not have enough money for the admin expenses involved in invoicing companies for OPW and chasing them up. Cashflow is never some minor accounting detail - screwing it up kills companies.)

I'll note further that pejorative comments about "feminists" seems to be something of a "beat" of yours. Maybe you should lay off it for awhile.

No, that doesn't seem to be the same. The mailing list explicitly states what the rebuttal claims as well: They were bad at collecting money for a time.

The mailing list _doesn't_ state that the director was in any way responsible. Your words were "the former Gnome Foundation executive director who caused them to run out of money". The reponse to your post linked to a statement that claimed that this isn't true and your link doesn't support that argument either.

I'd say that this ("She is the reason/she caused the foundation to run out of money", directly implying a personal responsibility) is a very big difference between these two stories. You might be correct - I wouldn't know. But again: I wouldn't consider these two statements (exactly or even remotely) the same.

They weren't just bad at collecting money either - if I'm understanding their announcements and FAQ correctly, the OPW came with contractual deadlines for Gnome to pay participants but no similar deadlines for sponsors to pay Gnome, which is why they had to prioritize OPW payments over everything else.

I am completely ignorant of this situation, but it is clear that the source you provided doesn't dispute the allegations but instead provides further support that the allegations are true.

The outreach program was so successful that the company went out of business!

And it was the accounting department's fault! Not the person in charge! (anyone care for a game of office politics?)

Honestly, the allegation came across as absurd in the original post, but your post makes me think that the story might actually be true.

And nobody really believed that increasing the amount of paid-for outreach-positions is a bad thing.

I have no opinion on this particular case, but why doesn't a cash-flow problem count as a financial mismanagement problem?

> The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors

An “ad hominem” argument against the would-be representative doesn't sound like an appropriate response to that …

Trying to spin the whole story as "it's those damn feminists again!!" is quite annoying.

Edit: Ah, looks like it probably didn't make the news because the President of the SFC didn't want to comment on it and the details were murky: https://lwn.net/Articles/665855/

We also know that the LF has at least VMWare and AllWinner in its ranks, and perhaps other companies with a vested interest in declawing the GPL. That, at least, seems to me like a conflict of interest.

At least one person associated to LF has publicly denied that LF is punishing SFC, but I remain skeptical:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/41x5ec/linux_foundat...

He was basically pitching kdbus on behalf on the automobile industry a year or two back, because they wanted a drop in replacement for QNX and its in-kernel RPC.

And you will find some "lovely" mailing list duels between him and Landley about documenting the interface between kernel and udev, as Landley was trying to develop a minimal udev replacement.

I'm not disputing GNOME had (has?) a problem - I'm not following anyway - or Garrett having an agenda (I mean come on, the LF never gave the community a voice, and the community never cared), but there seems to be no reason to accuse Sandler of mismanaging funds.

A single individual is rarely ever the reason an entire organization runs out of money or implements bad policy. Others must sign on and implement and sign off and not object.

Let's not have personal attacks on character; let's keep the thread focused on the issue. To direct attacks on an individual's character in order to make one's argument borders on bigotry and almost always qualifies as a bad argument.

The problem here is simply put; piss poor financial management.