Why I am retiring from contributing to FreeBSD

[franco]

I want to make this snappy and the TLDR is in the subject. This is not to fish for solidarity or discussion at length, but if you have questions I will try to answer them below.

On Friday, September 5 at 21:55, I got a no further signed mail from a "FreeBSD Core Team Secretary":

Due to repeated behavior that violates our community's code of conduct,
your access to FreeBSD Project services (Bugzilla, Wiki, Phabricator,
and the mailing lists) is suspended for three months, until the end of
November 2025.

It's now two weeks into December and I'm still blocked. I appreciate good rules as long as everybody also follows them, but in the many years I've contributed to FreeBSD I've seen exceptions and loopholes time and again. I don't wish to see them any longer.

According to the mail this is in direct relation to https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=283795 which is basically a continuation of a bug caused by https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=280701 where the core team made clear that proper bug reports must be raised. To me it seemed wrong that the relevant topic was then still ignored for roughly half a year until a different user and not a committer found and fixed the issue. Only then it seemed right to answer and correct users asking what is going on?

Perhaps the ban is deserved and I've gladly done my time, but I still don't know what the punishment of an external contributor is meant to do other than give me a number of sleepless nights and the cozy feeling on a Friday evening that I'm a very bad person (thanks I guess). If this is how contributors are structurally treated I don't see the point in contributing. Or maybe me throwing the towel is the goal?

I've moderately contributed to FreeBSD roughly since 2013 with very mixed success. The key was to persistently ask for committers all the time because a patch is still nothing compared to the commit it will be going into the tree which takes a couple of seconds. I've seen many committers come and go. My patches do resemble the average quality of FreeBSD committers submissions. I've studied computer science and helped run OPNsense as a volunteer for many years. My patches are now committed by people who have been on the project for much shorter periods of time if they are not being ignored. Commits being made by others don't follow standards I was trained on in the early years of my tenure in FreeBSD.

There is a lot more to tell here but I know it's a waste of time given what I've been through. At some point the self-fulfilling prophecy of me being an unlikable, unreasonable, inept and uncooperative person/coder started by FreeBSD adjacent enthusiasts around 2015 had taken a life of its own. I've told several people and core team members about a pattern of neglect and abuse towards me, but it seems that throwing me under the bus is the easiest solution for everyone involved to this day. I'm ok with that, but I am free to say that I don't very much enjoy it. A number of people from FreeBSD are actually active in the OPNsense scope these days. PfSense uses code contributed by OPNsense. We are all benefiting from each other. The situation is perfectly natural for open source efforts, so I don't understand why I am not being tolerated. I'd really like to hear the explanation for a 3 year old but upon asking I haven't gotten any answer either.

So now I'll have a lot more time to build community and code and releases in OPNsense and that's a good thing. People can look up to our standards instead. Use our patches or leave them. Be friendly and cooperative or not. It will be neat and we will know it's because we're doing great things here together. :)


Cheers,
Franco

[Kets_One]

For what it's worth: Love to have you around franco. Very much appreciate all the effort and time you invest in Opnsense (including the forum)!

[muchacha_grande]

Franco, I've been following a thread of a bug at FreeBSD for a while and I've seen what you are describing. If someone sometime give you an explanation it will be a 3 year one. Can't be other way.
It is sad that an open source community has to work with that tension.

[Greg_E]

Well, that's a mess happening in Linux too, many a video on the subject reading out the mailing list. Too bad, their loss, and thank you for the past work.

Will OPNsense fork BSD so that they can add in the work that's important (and being ignored), or will they continue using the main branch? Are any of the current forks worth moving towards for OPNsense?

Too bad the amount of work to move to Linux is on the scale of extremely large, moving to Debian or Alma might be worth doing as BSD will continue the slow march to obscurity. Just waiting for Broadcom to buy up all of BSD, we know where that would go. If it can be done to Redhat and Centos, it can be done to BSD, and Broadcom would do Broadcom things. Remember when Oracle did part of that? Those were the days.

[coffeecup25]

I've been out of IT for a long time. Your description brought back memories from those days. Back then it was common for IT 'pros' to group together like mean girls. Sad but true. You were one of them in lockstep or you were at risk of being talked about behind your back in harmful ways and being shunned if they could get away with it. I don't know if things are still the same, only with different technology, but I hope they are better today. Their loss.

[Greg_E]

Could it be from our "friends" on another project? Wouldn't be the first time, so history might repeat itself here.

[allan]

[ scratch that. I should not post out of frustration especially when I am unable to gather more info to help troubleshoot. ]

[franco]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the replies!  I got access back later that same day I posted this.  Quite the coincidence.  :)

I have confirmation now this is more about particular egos than technical matters and in my opinion I've always demonstrated a willingness to compromise even if it doesn't make sense technically.  In my view making decisions solely based on group dynamics will leave FreeBSD in a place where it deprives itself of technical know how, contributions and users, but we all have to make our decisions at the end of the day.

I've asked for my Bugzilla account to be removed.  I really don't see the need for it anymore.

> Will OPNsense fork BSD so that they can add in the work that's important (and being ignored)

Essentially, we have a soft fork and have had it for 10 years. It works very well. Release quality is better than any FreeBSD release out there because we fix a lot of things beyond mere errata or security advisories for our users.

> or will they continue using the main branch?

We're not using the main branch. We've always believed that actual releases are a far better starting point, also because it's cheap and easy to make these verbatim releases a lot better with a modern backport strategy. It does not appear to be compatible with the way FreeBSD wants to handle releases and user bug reports.

> Are any of the current forks worth moving towards for OPNsense?

You mean other BSDs? No, all have their ups and down. DragonFlyBSD might be the best match, but the downside is a small developer group, slower driver support, etc.

Linux is also out of the question.  You can take the frontend and build a new firewall, but I reckon it's not a lot of fun in the first year or so while you slowly work towards something that looks great but is barely usable.  ;)


Cheers,
Franco

[Maurice]

You're currently the maintainer of quite a few ports, correct? Any plans on how to proceed there?

All the best!

Maurice
(Totally not qualified to comment on the situation since I'm not that deep into internal FreeBSD dynamics.)

[franco]

> Any plans on how to proceed there?

Nope. I've asked FreeBSD committers, core team and even foundation for help on improving cooperation over the years. The ball was always in their court.

Not sure if it's really appropriate to kick me instead of the ball, but it is what it is. Someone clever will figure something out I guess.  ;)


Cheers,
Franco

[trasz@]

FWIW, core team is not responding to emails from FreeBSD committers anymore either.  They know they screwed up badly by trying to kick me out at request of certain youtuber, then were forced to (partially) confess to developers@.  I guess they have learned they can just ignore the developer community.

[franco]

Thanks for your message and your mailing list thread! There seem to be a number of similar stories out there. Let me add one more that matters.

Here is my one and only 2023 code of conduct complaint that I filed after bit of a backstory of misconduct in the ports scope towards me.

From: Sergio Carlavilla <carlavilla@freebsd.org>
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2023 11:06:12 +0200
Subject: Re: reporting an inappropriate mailing list reply
To: Franco Fichtner <franco@opnsense.org>
Cc: "conduct@freebsd.org" <conduct@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD Core Team <core@freebsd.org>

On Mon, 9 Oct 2023 at 11:03, Franco Fichtner <franco@opnsense.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> [REDACTED]
>
>
> Thanks,
> Franco

Hi Franco,

Okay, we've received the message.

We will contact you when we have studied the case and have a response.

Bye!

Sergio Carlavilla
Core Team Secretary.

I never got another reply on this complaint. I eventually chased down a core team member on the issue and the person assured me it would be taken care of internally. I trusted the person so there wasn't a reason to not agree to it. The email gives the offender a very lax outlook. Compared to how the core team handled the complaint against me  I just think both of these instances were inappropriate and unprofessional.

Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2024 10:19:40 +0100
From: XYZ <xyz@freebsd.org>
To: Franco Fichtner <franco@opnsense.org>
Subject: Re: reporting an inappropriate mailing list reply

On Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 10:08:26AM +0100, Franco Fichtner wrote:
> Hi [REDACTED],
>
> > On 6. Mar 2024, at 10:05, XYZ <xyz@freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> > Yes [REDACTED] can be border sometime, at even cross dangerous roads sometimes, I do
> > talk quite a lot with him about him, to make sure he improves.
>
> If I can take your word for it I'll let this go then.

You can take my word, on this, he [REDACTED], so I feel like it is kind of my
duty, his behaviour has degraded the time he started getting more involved in
the project, due accumulating lots of frustration, as a result he ends up being
more (too much?) opinionated, and even aggressive sometime, I am trying to cool
him down, as frustration is part of high involvements and at some point we all
need to be able to deal with it, or we simply burnout.

[REDACTED]

still if you see bad interactions, don't hesitate to send me a heads u
directly, I am not tracking all his communication, so I may miss them.

[REDACTED]

Best regards,
[REDACTED]

The trust in the core team was mostly gone in that instance. What came after and anyone can look up is the core team's inability to bring people together even over technical matters.

So I think it's clear the code of conduct is dead and the core team cannot claim it to justify its decisions. The illusion here is that "words" matter and people are supposed to be friendly but actions like systematic neglect and abuse of power are much worse for the code, its users and even its developers in the long run.


Cheers,
Franco