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 This port was originally made in Coreboot by Mate Kukri, so work mostly goes to them, but as for adding support for Libreboot, my name is completely left out.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.
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.
It was stolen though, I feel like I was manipulated into waiting just so that they had enough time to do it themselves. I will admit that both sides on communication was bad, but still, that’s work that I did and just to have it taken like that is a bit of a slap in the face. I didn’t just test the board, I added it into lbmk myself independtly. Leah never looked at my patch that worked and refuses to see it. We literally got the .ROM file to work off of my orginial patch after Leah had reconfigured the GBE and IFD region.
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.
They took the port that I was making for this board, they told me to wait a week, and then closed off my patch and took all the credit. The OG patch that I made was a WIP, we were looking over it to see what was wrong and I noted down what was wrong and fixed it in my next patch, which never got submitted because they told me to wait a week. They recreated the patch that I made from scratch once they got their hands on the board and submitted it.
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.
They stole the credit for the port though, I already had my own functioning patch but I was told to wait a week twice. So I did, and my patch was closed off ‘accidently’ and they submitted the patch themselves, after making me wait for no reason. This gave them enough time to do it themselves and remove my name from ever being there.
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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