[LEDE-DEV] Transparency and remaining OpenWrt developers

[Daniel Dickinson]

Hi,

It seems to me that one of the biggest accusations levelled at the LEDE
team is their split was not done in a transparent manner, and that they
are not yet transparent enough.

That sounds great and all as an argument, but it seems to me that from
the looks of it the LEDE team is serious about fixing the areas where
they are not transparent, but the only only things we've really heard
from the remaining OpenWrt developers is what LEDE did/is doing wrong.

If the remaining OpenWrt developers are *serious* about change being
possible *within OpenWrt* and therefore *truly* inviting a merge back of
LEDE with OpenWrt, it would help to see some evidence that the remaining
OpenWrt developers are genuinely willing to up the game, including on 
matters of transparency, governance, and management of infrastructure,
and not just trash talk the other team.

The CI thing Luka mentioned is an interesting technical improvement,
but there is more to this than just technical questions, and this
isn't just about doing GitHub because people like GitHub, or other
similarly populist items.  Furthermore, the remaining OpenWrt
developers need to demonstrate they are able recruit new actively
committing developers so that the tree doesn't languish or just
pick up changes from LEDE.

It seems to me that as much as LEDE hasn't been great at
communicating, especially before the fork, the remaining
developers have been even worse.

From what I recall the openwrt mailing list primarily
consisted of patches and ACK/NAK, comments on patches,
and little else.  The LEDE list and PR process is
much more communicative, which is one of the ways LEDE
has demonstrated that they really do want to change.
Furthermore when questions relating to transparency and
communication have come up, the team has been quick to
answer and attempt to address the concern (in fact I've
been far more of an apologist for them then they have
been for themselves, not sure why I feel that way about
the fork, perhaps because the have made a demonstration
of working for change for the better and that is
something I strive to do for myself).  I'd like to see
similar concrete changes from remaining developers if
I'm to believe the arguments that are being made, and
which are contrary to the impressions I developed from
the lack of communication, and the toxicity I saw on
private channels.

Regards,

Daniel