Table of Contents
I have a few considerations I'd like to share about this topic, but let's first see what happened. Let's go chronologically.
On the 25th of March, Linux developer Danilo Krummrich sent a series of patches to the mailing list titled "DRM Rust abstractions". As he mentions in the email, the series have been worked initially by Asahi Lina, who has since then stepped down, sent a private email to him saying "feel free to take anything that's useful and use it/submit it in any way", and hinted at the fact that she was fed up with kernel development and didn't want to have anything to do with it anymore. Danilo credits Lina as a co-author in all the patches, and asks her whether she's fine being co-author (instead of primary author, which Danilo set himself to be).
This last sentence is particularly important; let me quote it verbatim: if you, however, feel uncomfortable with any of the co-developed-by tags, due to the major changes, please let me know. Given the context, it seems to me somewhat clear that this refers to Lina being Co-author instead of primary author, and offers to swap the two around.
However, Asahi Lina instead interpreted this to mean that, if she was uncomfortable with being set as co-author, Danilo was willing to remove her as co-author, thus not crediting her at all. This immediately frustrates her, as she perceives that Danilo is open to demoting her to zero credit instead of promoting her to primary author. I'm still somewhat surprised that she jumped at this conclusion, but we'll get to that later.
As a result, she asks Danilo why she was not set as primary author, and specifically says "I'm really tired of kernel politics and I don't want to spend more brain cycles looking at all the other patches or having to argue (in fact I usually don't look at patch emails at all recently), but I would appreciate if you keep my authorship for files that I did largely author myself. After everything I've been going through the past weeks (some of the people on Cc know what that's about...) this feels like yet another slap in the face". Again, Danilo already offered to change the primary author, but Lina did not catch that at this time, and already uses some strong wording like "slap in the face".
Regarding the question of primary authorship, Danilo then explains that he thinks the patches have been changed extensively by him, thus warranting the primary authorship.
He points out that keeping Lina as primary author on patches heavily reworked by him would've meant misrepresenting her work instead, which is potentially an issue (let's say the code ends up not working: you wouldn't want Lina to get blamed for some change Danilo did). He also points out, again, that in Lina's email she said that Danilo was "free to take anything useful from my past patch submissions and use it / submit it in any way", and that he preferred not to bother her since she said she did not want to deal with kernel development anymore at all, to have a mental health break. Then, Danilo again offers more explicitly to set Lina as the primary author of some patches, and asks Lina which patches she would like to see changed.
Lina then replies to reiterate that she just assumed that primary authorship of her patches would be preserved out of kernel etiquette, and that "I don't have the spoons to make some deep analysis here, you should know how much of the code you changed, added, or just moved around. I'm not going to litigate this further. If you think splitting up a commit into multiple commits and moving code around warrants taking over primary authorship of a project I've been working on for years now, so be it. I'm just disappointed".
And then we're back to Danilo. He says, "the broader context of the private mail was about you stepping back on kernel development. You did so with a few more details that made it clear to me that you don't want to be bothered with kernel development any more. In combination with you giving permission to "use it/submit it in any way", I thought it's better to just pick a safe path to not misrepresent you given all the changes that I've made".
He also makes the point that Lina underestimates the extent of the changes he has made to her original code. He provides a full diff that contains all of his changes, and points out that Lina has both claimed that she "doesn't have the spoons to make some deep analysis here", but also accuses Danilo of not having made enough changes to warrant taking over primary authorship, two statements that seem somewhat contradicting: how do you know that, if you don't have the time to check properly? He again says that he's ready to change primary authorship, and points out that Lina hasn't yet asked to be set as primary author on any set of specific subset of patches, and instead spent time to stir up drama with some quite strong words. He says: "I neither have the time, nor am I willing to deal with random drama like this. If you want something changed, just go ahead and tell me what, without more drama and without more accusing me of things".
And this is where Lina completely breaks down:
Alright, then please remove my authorship entirely from this series, including Co-developed-by and signoff lines. I hereby release my code as CC-0, which means you don't need the signoffs, it's yours now. The same applies to any future code submitted that I originally authored as part of the Asahi kernel git tree. That way we don't need to argue about any of this. I thought asking for patches that I mostly authored to keep my Git authorship would be an uncontroversial request (and not unreasonable to ask you to figure out which those are, since you made the changes/slips, and #3 clearly is one), but apparently even that gets you flamed on Linux threads these days. I regret having been part of this community.
Thus, the root of the conflict so far is that Lina and Danilo disagree on the extent of the changes made by him; he's still willing to change primary authorship of the patches, but since he believes he significantly changed all of them, he's asking Lina which one to author to her. Lina wants Danilo to figure it out by himself, even though the whole point is that Danilo thinks that he's made significant changes to all of them, and thus can't just "figure it out himself". The solution by Lina is to just throw the table over, release everything as creative commons, even though Danilo was pretty professional and willing to collaborate throughout.
Here another Linux developer - Dave Airlie - pitches in, trying to convey the absurdity of the behavior of Lina. He says,
The project will maintain authorship/signoffs on any patches that are clearly still authored by you, we will err on the side of caution and on rewritten patches which share some decent amount of history shall retain your authorship. In this case it does appear instead of putting in the 5 minutes of looking at Danilo's reasoning and supplied diff, and either saying "my bad, this is sufficiently new code and I don't feel I wrote it" or "I'd still prefer to retain authorship despite your changes", both of which Danilo indicated would be respected, you somehow picked door number 3 which probably took more time and effort than either of the above options. Again no need to pick door number 3 here, you can let the bus go below 50, it won't explode.
At this point in time, people started to notice about this entire discussion. The fact that one of the previoully lead developers of a major project in the Linux world was releasing all of her code as Creative Commons was somewhat newsworthy, and as such, people started talking about it.
As such, a thread was created about it on the Linux subreddit, where people reading the entire discussion mostly sided with Danilo (understandably so, in my opinion).
This further frustrated Lina, who at this point felt compelled to go through the patches to understand whether she should've been primary author or not. She did so in a mathematical way, arguing that she wrote around 75% of the code, and she thought Danilo's changes to be minor. Which is fair – however, she then adds "And I'm sure Danilo knows this, having done the refactoring/rearranging/modification work to get here". Through this sentence, Lina is de-facto claiming Danilo to be lying, since Danilo instead saying that he thinks he has made significant changes.
She then went back to the mailing list to post the following message:
I wanted to keep this private, but apparently it is impossible for me to send two emails in reply to a Linux kernel thread without it ending up all over the news and the entire world speculating about why I am so upset. I would be a lot more willing to work with the kernel community if I hedn't been traumatied by a major Linux kernel maintainer having privately admitted to siding with an abuser and harasser who has attacked me relentlessly for over one year now, mocking me for it, using their arguments and wording against me, lying to their peers to cover up actions and collusion against me, and more. Now please, let me leave this community in peace. You all figure out what to do with my code and whether you care about proper attribution. I just want out.
At this point in time, I think it's clear that Lina is in too much distress to handle the discussion. She has misinterpreted the initial offer by Danilo, and then shown that she assumes Danilo to be lying instead of acting in good faith, and now she's explaining that her frustration in this discussion is also caused by prior bad behavior by other Linux kernel maintainers; all of which make it impossible to resolve the central conflict of the discussion, which is the disagreement over the significance of Danilo changes.
And, again, Lina wants Danilo to understand by himself which patches to author to Lina, but Danilo won't be able to do that, because he thinks he has made significant contributions to all the patches.
Lina then comes back to the thread, also explaining that she believes to have written 75% of the code of the patches, and asks Danilo to put her as primary author of the patches from 3 to 7. Note here that she says she has been "forced" to do this analysis, which I don't believe to be completely true.
Danilo then decides to point out that code authorship is not about who authored the largest percentage of codelines, and he decides to list out all of the changes that he's made to the original patches by Lina, pointing out that they are not minor reworks. Then, he says that he's fine with changing ownership of the patches 3 through 7, but points out that it would include one patch that has been authored by him, from scratch (and thus, it doesn't make sense to ask to change the authorship there).
At this point, he's also clearly frustrated by Lina's assumption of bad faith from him, and he says that
First of all, you keep talking as if I would have been restisting to do any changes, even though I offered you to change things from the get-go. Instead of taking the offer, you decided to go with wild accusations, without even properly looking at things and understanding my intentions. [...] The decision I took is clearly reasonable and nothing about it is uncommon. [...] However, I understand that you prefer to have primary authorship, even if the code has been re-organized in new commits, moved, modified or rewritten. This really is totally fine for me, and I won't argue about it (even though one could).
I think he's right, really: when assuming good faith from him, he has been completely reasonable throughout, and very available to fix things. The issue is that, apparently due to previous bad experiences, Lina is assuming bad faith instead - she said it herself - and is not willing to collaborate. This results in drama and discussions, which make Lina even more frustrated. In her next emails, she says that
Though given the mess this turned into, as soon as this conversation is over, I will be sending all kernel-related emails directly to sieve-discard. While a simple question would have been fine and encouraged, this mess is not, and I do not have the time or mental health cycles to deal with any more of this going forward. So indeed, if you ever find yourself questioning something about my code going forward, please take your best guess, because I'm now really done with kernel involvement completely.
And, later,
See? You could have started with that story about drm::Device being a more major change than the others and spared us all the blind arguing and wasting of time.
The discussion goes on, but it does so in circles, and I think I can spare it to you; at this point, you probably understand the main points of disagreement and arguments on both sides. I have a few things to say myself.
Firstly, should I not have made this video? Again, the previous developer of a significant project in the Linux space breaks down in the Linux kernel mailing list and tries to make all of her code CC0. A Reddit thread about this is trending, and even Brodie did a video about this a few hours ago (you should go watch it, by the way, he goes into more detail in the discussion). Is this unwarranted?
On one side, I think not. If you stir up drama in a public place, and you are a content creator and significant contributor of a well-known project, you should expect people to be interested in your actions and report about what you do. I think it's unfair to expect everyone to avoid the topic altogether, even though all the information is publicly available, and people are interested in it.
Brodie also points out (and I had not thought of it) that Lina could've also tried to resolve this privately with Danilo by sending him only an email. By replying publicly, you're accepting that eyes will be on your email. This is particularly important given that Lina is a content creator, which - I'm sorry to say - means that you have more responsibility in public than other people.
On the other side, there's an interesting point to be made in open source vs closed source development. Not every good developer might have the social skills to handle attention and Reddit threads about them; however, in open-source development has to happen publicly, whereas Windows kernel developers don't have to be held accountable in the same manner. This might insert some extra burden on open source developers that they don't necessarily want, making software development a bit harder for us. However, I don't think the solution to this can be "ah, you people should just close your eyes and pretend not to see this". That won't work.
Finally, another important point this raises is how we should handle developers who are not in the mental space to be contributors and participate in development discussions. I believe that, given Lina's current situation, there was no way to resolve this without stirring up drama and being respectful to Danilo at the same time – though I might be wrong.
So, if we want to preserve the mental health of our contributors, how do we react when someone is already in burnout and they're making things worse for themselves? I would like to see big projects organized with people who are experts in mental health and can jump in when conflicts happen to help everyone involved; the status quo is letting those arguments play out in public and without guardrails.
