Determining Simon Glass's future in the U-Boot project

[Ilias Apalodimas]

Hi Tom,


On Wed, 28 May 2025 at 20:59, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> Hey all,
>
> First, I am not happy to be writing this email. But at this point, I
> feel I have no other choice, for the good of the overall project and
> community.
>
> Back in January[0] of this year I made a post with almost this same
> subject line. At that point there had already been a number of problems
> working with Simon and the overall community. I did not include a list
> of links. At that point the easiest answer would be to go to the mailing
> list archive, pick any thread that Simon and I had and see the long
> disagreements. This trend has fundamentally not changed. And while I
> started this out with some threads and my summaries of them, instead I
> want to point to this email I sent this mornig:
> https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20250528170533.GE100073@bill-the-cat/
>
> And to repeat what I said there, Simon needs to decide if it's more
> important to work with the community or have his way every time. Simon
> cannot have both.

+1.

Since I was involved in enough ... I don't mind reviewing patches and
giving feedback. That's what I signed up for. Reading the same 30+
series patches though with only 10% of the feedback addressed is just
not working.

> Simon needs to accept that some things he think are
> good ideas have been rejected or he needs to fork off from U-Boot. Or he
> can ask the community to take over as the project head. If the community
> wants Simon to run things, I will step down and just be an individual
> contributor again. Five months of this experiment shows me that it's not
> working at all and will only be a bigger problem as time goes on.

FWIW I think you are doing an excellent job and I'd like the situation
to remain as is.

>
> And, I mean it. I cannot take the additional stress of what new problems
> await me every morning. I do not take the above lightly, but I do not
> think the project can become healthy moving forward without some
> resolution here and quickly. While I won't claim my time as the head of
> the project has been perfect, I have tried my best to always be honest
> and fair and to seek compromise.
>
> With respect to voting, would anyone volunteer to run a poll from
> https://civs1.civs.us/ (which is used by the Yocto Project /
> OpenEmbedded and likely other FOSS projects/communities) ?

Thanks
/Ilias
>
> --
> Tom