Wine Took the Bait (Mono), Soon Starts the Microsoft Circus With the Banhammer
Intentional or not, the move seems deeply misguided
It's not a controversial thing to say: large companies are exercising more control over the thing/s they claim to "donate" to, whether it's a project or an organisation and whether the "donation" is money, code, or whatever. The invisible strings get attached to developers, projects, companies etc. It's not even a "computer" or "FOSS" thing; it happens all the time in other areas, including politics. Putting aside the loss of direction at the Linux Foundation or LF (whose budget is about 97% non-Linux), in an upcoming video we might comment on what happened to Electronic Frontier Foundation, European Digital Rights (EDRi), Southern Poverty Law Center, and many others. There's some political angle to some of it, hence we'd rather not elaborate too much in text. It would potentially seem off-topic, maybe off-putting.
Today's main focus will be Wine (or WINE), the CoC, Mono, and Microsoft. There's a lot to be learned about (or from) what happened to Southeast Linuxfest or SELF [1, 2], which cautioned about doom by CoC. It's presented as beneficial or at least benign, but then, put in the wrong hands, it's a weapon against the "host"; it's like a Trojan horse designed to benefit large corporations as enforcers. I saw that destroying events, projects, companies, and even news sites (gamingonlinux.com nearly fell for it; it's an easy target because anyone can comment on stories, even Unabomber proponents).
The issue was first introduced this morning, albeit with very few words because words are better done after we have concrete answers, not speculations or mere assertions.
When one person in IRC learned of the "CoC for Wine" (hours ago) he was very alarmed. "Well," he said, "the Mono thing sort of leads me to believe Microsoft is taking control. Probably the usual. Proxies."
Mono has long been a proxy (via Ximian, Novell, Xamarin and so on), so why assume this time it's different? It's a form of social engineering and speaking of which, there's a new rant about the likes of Jono Bacon, a longtime pusher of Mono, Microsoft etc. inside Canonical (he's still at it). The basic premise it, Microsoft uses human operatives or turns innocuous people into shills and moles inside companies, projects etc. Sometimes it rewards them later and sometimes it only gives them promises of reciprocation (promises are a lot cheaper; they may cost nothing).
"I'd say the enraged mob is not the real community," an associate recalls from experience, "but Microsofters and 'outside' agitators pushing for closed source, proprietary alternatives. Bacon was only ever a corporate spinmeister lording it over the real community and trying to impose corporate will down from on high. One of, perhaps the single worst, bad decisions made at Canonical was to let him onto the payroll."
"Apropos Lunduke, recall also that Guido van Rossum was kicked out of his own project by the creeps Lunduke is ranting about."
It's with that in mind that we sadly have to deal with WINE, seeing nonchalant posts about a CoC on its way. "Instead of reinventing the wheel," the project's head said, "I propose that we adopt the Contributor Covenant [5] that many other projects (including Mono) are already using."
It looks like Microsoft has just exported a CoC to WINE and Alexandre Julliard does not recognise the danger (which is, as usual, disguised as manners).
Here's his full message: (pay careful attention to point 5)
Folks,
As you may have noticed, now that the ARM64 support is done (just kidding), I've picked up the work on the Gitlab migration:
1. The Wiki has been moved to Gitlab, it's now at [1]. Existing URLs to the previous Wiki are redirected to the appropriate page. There are also separate Wikis for appdb, vkd3d and wine-staging, under their respective project pages.
As part of the migration I've done some minor edits, but most of the Wiki is badly out-of-date, and could use some love. Help is welcome! Check the Writers page [2] for details on how to contribute.
2. We are now hosting the Mono project on the WineHQ Gitlab [3]. Please join me in welcoming the Mono developers to our community!
3. We have new hardware for the Gitlab server, which is now noticeably faster. Thanks to Jeremy Newman for setting this up! This also made it possible to enable robots.txt again so that our content is indexed. The next step will be to install new hardware for the Gitlab runners to offer more CI bandwidth.
4. The Gitlab issue tracker is currently disabled because it was attracting too much spam. I'm going to re-enable it, first for use by Mono, and then ultimately also for Wine itself. To fight the spam I'm planning to add an explicit user verification step, modelled along the procedure used by Freedesktop.org [4].
5. As part of the new sign-up process, I think it would be a good idea to have an explicit Code of Conduct to spell out our expectations.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I propose that we adopt the Contributor Covenant [5] that many other projects (including Mono) are already using.
Thoughts? Questions? Comments?
[1]: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis [2]: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Writers [3]: https://gitlab.winehq.org/mono [4]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/wikis/home [5]: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/
-- Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org
"Next step then is that they expel all the senior contributors and other key people from the project," our associate predicts.
"There's a lot more that could have been said explicitly about the dangers," he said earlier (before seeing the above message), suggesting a more in-depth follow-up. "It's obvious to us but maybe not to most readers, especially casual readers, about the maintenance burden and how once Microsoft uses its ovipositor to push a CoC into the innards of the project it will consume the project from the inside."
"The CoC waving can be used as an opportunity to review the way those have been used against other very prominent projects."
SELF, LF, etc. are named at the top; "but perhaps even more important than noting the harm being inflicted upon the WINE project by Microsofters" is the why and why now? "There's no obligation for WINE to absorb either the Microsofters or their code, so something is certainly amiss."
We spent the morning looking for further information under the assumption that forums online might have the key pointers (links, summaries and so on).
"I am on the look out," the associate said as well, but we can only see what is publicly published. "There are some pubic-facing mailing lists, with archives [1, 2, 3]; that last one would be difficult to sift through, due to volume. At least they use GitLab. Not the best, but very far from the worst."
There are mailing lists. Nothing in WINE-Announce however. "Mono was in Microsoft GitHub and is moved into GitLab," the associate noted, but not much can be found about it. "No hint in the forum. Not much in bugs. The agitators can be found here." So we're left with just the message from Alexandre Julliard and it sounds like the CoC is being inherited for the entire project just because of Microsoft (Mono).
The associate wondered: "Maybe the attack was the result of intrigue via a private list?" Assuming that something instigated it, it was almost definitely Mono and - inter alia - Microsofters. Some are now actively involved in WINE as a project, which means it's the same agitation as Rust inside Linux.
Maybe this weekend we'll find time to record videos and deal with more political aspects of it. These are inherently political tricks and stunts, exploiting social engineering to oust the principal people and replace them with stooges (or just leave the project to rot). We've seen this many times before. Why expect different outcomes this time? █