Some info teased about Sonny’s ban last year. People have been working to get his unbanned since. Hopefully this means that Sonny hasn’t done anything that bad to deserve the ban, though that would imply that there are issues inside of the Gnome Foundation (besides all the nonsense Lunduke spouts), which would be worrying.

The same is not true of projects with a monolithic entity at the center. If there’s a conflict in that central monolith it can spiral ever wider if it isn’t resolved, affecting more and more structures and people, and doing drastically more damage.

This is a lesson we’ve unfortunately had to learn the hard way when, out of the blue, Sonny was banned last year. I’m not going to talk about the ban here (it’s for Sonny to talk about if/when feels like it), but suffice to say that it would not have happened had we not done the STF project under the Foundation, and many community members including myself do not agree with the ban.

What followed was, for some of us, maybe the most stressful 6 months of our lives. Since last summer we’ve had to try and keep the STF project running without its main architect, while also trying to get the ban situation fixed, as well as dealing with a number of other issues caused by the ban. Thousands of volunteer hours were probably burned on this, and the issue is not even resolved yet. Who knows how many more will be burned before it’s over. I’m profoundly sad thinking about the bugs we could have fixed, the patches we could have reviewed, and the features we could have designed in those hours instead.

I think we are at a cross road in terms of the leadership. We are at the end of an era and the dawn of a new chapter. There is plenty of uncertainty but the community always seems to power though.

Sounds like maybe there’s a need for a separate “development” foundation that would be a contributor just like the corporate contributors?