It was only a matter of time before the illegal, erratic, inhumane, and cruel behaviours and policies of the second Trump regime were going to affect the open source world in a possibly very visible way. Christian Hergert, longtime GNOME and Linux contributor, employed by Red Hat, wanted to leave the US with his family and move to Europe, but requests to remain employed by Red Hat were denied. As such, he decided to end his employment at Red Hat and push on with the move. However, without employment, his work on open source software is going to suffer.
While at their in-person visa appointment in Seattle, US border patrol goons shot two people only a few blocks away, underlining the urgency with which people might want to consider getting out of the US, even if it means losing employment. Regardless, the end result is that quite a bit of user-facing software that millions of people use every day is going to be affected.
This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care.
For many years, I’ve been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn’t something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions.
↫ Christian Hergert
The list of projects for which Hergert is effectively the sole maintainer is long, and if you’re a Linux user, odds are you’re using at least some of them: GNOME’s text editor, GNOME’s terminal, GNOME’s flagship IDE Builder, and tons of lower-level widely-used frameworks and libraries like GtkSourceView, libspelling, libpeas, and countless others. While new maintainers will definitely be found for at least some of these, the disruption will be real and will be felt beyond these projects alone. There’s also the possibility that Hergert won’t be the only prolific open source contributor seeking to leave the US and thus reducing their contributions, especially if a company like Red Hat makes it a policy not to help its employees trying to flee whatever mess the US is in.
Stories like these illustrate so well why the “no politics!” crowd is so utterly misguided. Politics governs every aspect of our lives, especially so if you’re part of a minority group currently being targeted by the largest and most powerful state apparatus in the world, and pretending to be all three wise monkeys at once is not going to make any of that go away. Even if you’re not directly targeted because you’re not transgender, you’re not brown, you’re not an immigrant, or not whatever else they fancy targeting today, the growing tendrils of even an incompetent totalitarian regime will eventually find you and harm you.
More so than any other type of software, open source software is made by real humans, and as these totalitarian tendrils keep growing, more and more of these real humans will be affected, no matter how incompetent these tendrils might be. You can’t run away and hide from that reality, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
“Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions.”
–> Another example of the hypocrisy in the “tech” industry.
If the “chaos” in USA is affecting open-software in a {real, long-term} manner, would/can Europe rise to the occassion and add some stability/maintainability to the open-source ecosystem (at least at the IMPORTANT developer-level) ?
cade117,
Two things
1. That xkcd is pretty much real: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Nobody (companies or otherwise) gives even the smallest amount of thought unless things becomes immediate and personal needs
2. EU? Have you seen EU? As much as they love to talk about things… it would take 18 months for them to give an emergency funding to a project (just this other day I was talking with a friend who is trying to get scholarships for low income high achieving kids in Germany)
US is high speed / high stress. EU is low speed / low stress.
Choose your poison.
I’m at a loss here.
I don’t know the entire circumstances, so trying to decode what is available in that post.
He(?) is an active maintainer in GNOME, and loss of institutional knowledge, nor close personal relationships is never a good thing.
But… (yes there is a but), he seems to choose France for family reasons, and the most important culprits are RedHad that is refusing to sponsor a visa for relocation, and country of France (or maybe EU) that denies US persons long term employment opportunities.
Because, might be insensitive, but one would ask: Why not Canada? Especially French Canada?
Anyway, best of luck to him. Hope he finds more happiness on the other side of the pond.
Thom Holwerda,
I find the political transformations taking place are pretty scary for democracy and I sympathize with anyone who is going through this sort of life altering decision. However is there any evidence at all that the denied relocation was anything other than a normal business decision? Not everything is about politics and the link didn’t suggest it was. I would probably cite the significant number of layoffs conducted by Bezos at the Washington Post and contributing $75 million for the filming of Melania to be examples of politically motivated pressure..