Leah Rowe, the creator of Libreboot, stole my work.
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 This port was originally made in Coreboot by Mate Kukri, so work mostly goes to them, but as for adding support for Libreboot, my name is completely left out.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.
What's even more ironic is that a contributor was banned. Under the GNU and FSF sibling organization, it is very difficult to get fellow developers to work on your project. Terrible communication skills on their part.
I felt like I knew this name "Leah Rowe" somewhere from my memory, until I realized that this person has a lot of online beef. If their past actions point out to them being rude, toxic and disingenuous, I think you should not stay in that company.
Think of the ban as a blessing, and focus your energy on some other project where you are valued.
Leah has said some dumb stuff but I think this particular separation from the GNU project was the correct decision. The dogmatic no blobs approach wasn't working, it is better to reduce/minimise the binary blobs and support more devices imo. Don't agree with their previous actions though.