Leah Rowe, the creator of Libreboot, stole my work.

Lemmy@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 85 points –

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 This port was originally made in Coreboot by Mate Kukri, so work mostly goes to them, but as for adding support for Libreboot, my name is completely left out.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.

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I'm sorry to hear about this, do you have some links to your GitHub and the interactions?

EDIT: I checked Leah's Mastodon, found this interaction: https://files.catbox.moe/6dftac.png https://mas.to/@libreleah/111997718668105706 And here's the IRC interaction: https://av.vimuser.org/lorenzo.txt

https://libreboot.org/contrib.html#lorenzo-aloe

I haven't taken the time to read all of this fully, simply trying to share info that is not supplied by either parties.

EDIT: Taking more time to read it, it seems so far:

OP's code was buggy and bricking boards. Leah requested a patch to solve the known problems. OP took too long, and when Leah got a personal copy of the same computer/board, she worked on her patch and implemented it. OP is still listed on the site. https://libreboot.org/contrib.html#lorenzo-aloe

Provided hardware testing for the Dell OptiPlex 9020, also provided testing for proxmox with GPU passthrough on Dell Precision T1650, confirming near-native performance; with this, you can boot operating systems virtually natively, performance-wise, on a Libreboot system in cases where that OS is not natively supported.

All round good guy, an honest and loyal fan.

I personally have not written any code nor submitted anything to Libreboot, but it seems OP is still credited despite the claims of being stolen. I can't confirm if any code was used by OP or if Leah used 100% original code, as that's not my expertise. And even then, I'm not sure if the GPL/whatever license Libreboot uses is cool or uncool on that.

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