fidzu : debian

Free and open source software, ethical technology, and digital autonomy have a number of great thinkers, inspiring leaders, and hard working organizations. I see two discussions occurring now that I feel the need to address: What will we do next? Who will our new great leader be?

The thing is, we don't need to do something new next, and we don't need to find new leader.

Organizations and individuals have been doing amazing work in our sphere for more than thirty years. We only need to look at the works of groups like Public Labs, OpenStreetMap, and Wikimedia to see where the future of our work lies: applying the principles of user freedom to create demonstrable change, build equity, and fight for justice. I am positively inspired by the GNOME community and their dedication to building software for people in every country, of every ability, and of every need. Outreachy and projects and companies that participate in Outreachy internships are working hard to build the future of community that we want to see.

Deb Nicholson recently reminded me that we cannot build a principled future where people are excluded from the process of building it. She also pointed out that once we've have a techno-utopia, it will include everyone, because it needs to. This utopia is built on ideas, but it is also built by plumbers - by people doing work on the ground with those ideas.

Deb Nicholson is another inspiration to me. I've been lucky enough to know her since 2010, when she graciously began to mentor me. I now consider her both a mentor and a dear friend. Her ideas are innovative, her principles hard, and her vision wide.

Deb is one of the many people who have helped and continue to help shape my ideas, teach me things. Allison Randall, Asheesh Laroia, Christopher Lemmer-Webber, Daniel Khan Gilmore, Elana Hashman, Gabriella Coleman, Jeffrey Warren, Karen Sandler, Karl Fogel, Stefano Zacchiroli - these are just a few of the individuals who have been necessary figures in my life.

We don't need to find new leaders and thinkers because they're already here. They've been here, thinking, writing, speaking, and doing for years.

What we need to do is listen to their voices.

As I see people begin to discuss the next president of the Free Software Foundation, they do so in a context of asking who will be leading the free software movement. The free software movement is more than the FSF and it's more than any given individual. We don't need to go in search of the next leader, because there are leaders who work every day not just for our digital rights, but for a better world. We don't need to define a movement by one man, nor should we do so. We instead need to look around us and listen to what is already happening.

17 Sep 2019 9:16am GMT

On Saturday, I wrote an email to the FSF asking them to cancel my membership. Other people who I greatly respect are doing the same. This came after the president of the FSF made some pretty reprehensible remarks saying that the "most plausible scenario is that [one of Epstein's underage victims] presented themselves as entirely willing" while being trafficked. This isn't the only incident, but it is the straw that broke the camel's back.

In my capacity as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I have also written to the FSF. One of the most important parts of my role is to think of the well being of our community and the GNOME mission. One of the GNOME Foundation's strategic goals is to be an exemplary community in terms of diversity and inclusion. I feel we can't continue to have a formal association with the FSF or the GNU project when its main voice in the world is saying things that hurt this aim.

I greatly admire the work of FSF staffers and volunteers, but have now reached the point of concluding that the greatest service to the mission of software freedom is for Richard to step down from FSF and GNU and let others continue in his stead. Should this not happen in a timely manner, then I believe that severing the historical ties between GNOME, GNU and the FSF is the only path forward.

Edit: I've also cross-posted this to the GNOME discourse instance.

16 Sep 2019 6:05pm GMT

I guess that is just one of the things you've to know, so maybe it helps someone else.

We saw some warnings in our playbook rollouts like

[WARNING]: sftp transfer mechanism failed on [192.168.23.42]. Use
ANSIBLE_DEBUG=1 to see detailed information

They were actually reported for sftp and scp usage. If you look at the debug output it's not very helpful for the average user, similar if you go to verbose mode with -vvv. The later one at least helped to see parameters passed to sftp and scp, but you still see no error message. But if you set

scp_if_ssh: True

or

scp_if_ssh: False

you will suddenly see the real error message

fatal: [docker-023]: FAILED! => {"msg": "failed to transfer file to /home/sven/testme.txt /home/sven/
.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1568643306.1439135-27483534812631/source:\n\nunknown option -- A\r\nusage: scp [-346BCpqrv]
[-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]\n           [-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program] source
... target\n"}

Lesson learned, as long as ansible is running in "smart" mode it will hide all error messages from the user. Now we could figure out that the culprit is the -A for AgentForwarding, which is for obvious reasons not available in sftp and scp. One can move it to group_vars ansible_ssh_extra_args. The best documentation regarding this, beside of the --help output, seems to be the commit message of 3ad9b4cba62707777c3a144677e12ccd913c79a8.

16 Sep 2019 4:16pm GMT