Hyperledger Governance in Disarray Says Whistleblower

A whistleblower has come forward to say what follows, with it completely unverified and unedited, typos and all:

“What a hot mess Hyperledger Governance has been. You are probably familiar with the recent Technical Steering Committee being captured by IBM.  Well the TSC calls are all in disarray now. 

Arnaud, the new chair, cannot keep the meeting on schedule and on topic.  I suppose this is better than the old chair who took a few months off at the beginning of the year. 

IBM is still bitter Intel peed in their fabric pool when they brought Sawtooth in within weeks of the launch of Hyperledger, and it shows.  They don’t like playing ball with anyone that attempts to show leadership.  They like the appearance of Diversity but sabotage it in other projects.

They continually have problems keeping the Linux Foundation staff appraised of what it is exactly they are deciding.  LF staff tells projects one thing based on previous TSC meetings, but when they get to TSC approval something else happens when they move the goalposts (like today when an IBMer foisted an external standard on a new project as a new condition of full membership). 

What is worse is they almost never give a no, it’s always no action and taken off the agenda. Unless an IBMer proposed the action, then the TSC is bullied into the IBM acceptable path.  One notable exception was when hedera hashgraph tried to join and they gave them a full stop on their patents, but that served to keep a competitor out.

This weeks call is a good one.  Hyperledger Besu is trying to get active status, and the LF staff supported it and said they would get it.  However they were put in the backlog for a month while other new items were addressed before discussing their item.  Then the chair refused to accept a vote.  Rather than clear reasons fuzzy ‘I don’t feel they are diverse enough’ reasons were given.

IBM has total control over the Fabric project.  What looks like diversity is masked by the lack of diversity in their governance.  In Github the Fabric admins are all IBMers and the release management group, the group that decides wether or not a release goes out and what goes into it and ultimately what is acceptable, are all IBM. 

If IBM were to step away from the project they would be unable to add new maintainers to the project and release software.  There’s a full expose here too worth digging into.

In the #tsc rocket chat (chat.hyperledger.com, you will need a linux id account, but they don’t actually verify real names) there is quite a bit of dissent to the way Arnaud has been handling things from non-IBMers. 

Terms like ‘punitive’ and ‘hostage’.  There is a clear lack of transparency as to how things actually occur in the TSC and there is evidence that it is mostly IBMers, not in public forums, discussing among themselves, what does and does not happen.”

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