openSUSE's board turmoil

By Jonathan Corbet
March 5, 2020

Like many larger free-software projects, openSUSE has an elected board that is charged with handling various non-technical tasks: organizing events, dealing with conduct issues, managing the project's money, etc. Sitting on such a board is usually a relatively low-profile activity; development communities tend to pay more attention to technical contributions than other types of service. Every now and then, though, board-related issues burst into prominence; that is the case now in the openSUSE project, which will be holding a special election after the abrupt resignation of one-third of its board.

The openSUSE project has, in fact, just held a board election that closed on January 31. There were four candidates for the two available seats; in the end, Simon Lees was returned to the board for another term and Sarah Julia Kriesch won the other seat. The discussion over the course of the election was perhaps a bit more contentious than usual, with Kriesch in particular stirring things up by claiming to be the driving force behind the in-progress openSUSE foundation effort and seemingly overlooking the existence of openSUSE contributors in China (something she later apologized for). That all settled down, though, and it appeared that the new board was set to get to work after the announcement of the results on February 1.

Resignations

On February 11, though, Kriesch resigned her newly won board seat, citing "personal reasons". In response, the board appointed Vinzenz Vietzke — who had narrowly come in third during the election — to fill that seat.

Then, on February 27, Christian Boltz also resigned from the board, stating that "some things happened in the board that are completely against my principles and beliefs". His message did not go into details, and included a request to the community: "please don't speculate about the details or ask for them". Unfortunately, due to the fact that there were humans involved, such a request was doomed to be ignored. Numerous community members expressed concerns about these two resignations, especially when Kriesch confirmed that they were related.

One area of particular concern was the idea that the board would, again, appoint a new member to fill the empty seat. Given the fact that there was some obvious conflict happening within the board, it was not entirely unreasonable to worry that the board might be using these appointments to suppress whatever disagreement was taking place. As Jim Henderson put it:

But there's a possible appearance of impropriety here, and an appointment now without general information as to the nature of the conflict is going to appear to be tainted, whether it is or isn't.

What's clear to me is this: Something is seriously wrong in the board - serious and intractable enough that two board members felt *resignation* was their best course of action.

The pressure quickly grew to the point where the board evidently felt the need to respond; that happened two days later, with a statement that it was all the result of a code-of-conduct issue:

For the second time Sarah significantly breached the guiding principles and how she chose to deal with this situation led to 2/3rds of board members believing that she should step down from her role within the board.

As all of you can imagine, this decision was not an easy one, and the board gave her the opportunity to try to solve what happened. Unfortunately the ultimate outcome was to offer her to step down instead of publicly removing her from the board per the openSUSE election rules.

Boltz then confirmed that the board's handling of this situation was behind his resignation, after grumbling for a bit about the posting of (previously) confidential information.

As one might imagine, there is some disagreement with how the board has represented the situation; Kriesch denies any breach of the project's guiding principles, for example. And not everybody is happy with how it was handled. For the most part, though, the community appears to have accepted the explanation and is ready to get back to its real work.

Aftermath

Perhaps as a result of the concerns that were expressed about the remaining board members making another appointment, the board has announced that Boltz's seat will be filled by a special election instead. Details on how that election will be run are to be posted in the near future.

Early in the discussion there were some suggestions that the entire board could resign and a new one elected, but that is not going to happen. As former board chair Richard Brown pointed out, the project has struggled to find candidates for elections in the past; finding enough people to fill an entirely new board in the current environment, where board members are taking fire publicly for their decisions, would be a challenge.

There was also a call for tightening the rules regarding who can serve on the board after an allegation of a "special relationship" between Kriesch and Boltz. It appears, though, that said relationship is not particularly special, and that there is little appetite for regulating how board members can relate to each other outside of the project in any case. So no changes are to be expected on that front.

Finally, there were also concerns about this whole drama playing out in public; that led to a suggestion for the creation of a private list to keep dirty laundry out of public view. It seems that suggestion may well be acted upon. Private lists are certainly not unheard of in the free-software community, and they may help to avoid some public pain. They can also keep relevant information away from stakeholders who are not on those lists, though.

Meanwhile, the work of creating the openSUSE distributions continues as usual; the board has little to do with that. Hopefully the tasks that the board does concern itself with — such as the ongoing foundation work — continue to move forward as well. Before long the board should be back up to full strength with community-elected members and this whole episode will fade into memory.