This is the first of three posts I intend to make regarding the condition and actions of the FIG, and what they reveal.

The Past

The show trial and subsequent vote to remove me has concluded, and I remain: the complainants were defeated, 15 to 9.

Now that the vote is done, I can assert openly that this was a “clearing the decks” operation. It was intended (in large part) to remove the most-vocal opponent to the FIG 3.0 proposal by Larry Garfield and Michael Cullum, and to prepare the way for implementing the Contributor Covenant (or some other SJW-inspired code of conduct). I predicted that conversations about both would resume very soon after the vote no matter which way it went, and that looks to have been prescient.

The complainants, and their secretarial collaborator, wanted a vote (not mediation) from the outset. I guess they figured it would be a slam-dunk to have me removed. What they didn’t expect was that roughly half of the participants would be either against my removal, or against the complainants themselves.

So instead of a slam-dunk, they had actual resistance on their hands. That’s why the secretarial collaborator dragged it out past the 2-week point, so there could be some chance of rallying support for the “removal” side. Little support was raised that was not shortly pushed-back against.

Then the complainants realized they had no options other than a vote, which they now thought they might lose. This is why they revived the idea of “alternative resolutions”. But they themselves presented no alternatives other than “shut up” and “go away”.

Even at the end, to keep their actions and their bias hidden, the secretaries suggested (to me personally) making the vote private, on authority they have not been granted.

Remember: the secretaries, in particular Michael Cullum, overstepped their bounds once again to enable this drama.

Even so, I must caution against reading too much into the results of the vote. The voters did not approve of me per se, so much as they disapproved of the complainants, the complaint itself, or the act of throwing someone out. It is not so much a vindication for me personally, as a repudiation of the complainants.

This is now all in the past, and a permanent part of the FIG. Tomorrow I will talk about the current state of the FIG.


Are you stuck with a legacy PHP application? You should buy my book because it gives you a step-by-step guide to improving you codebase, all while keeping it running the whole time.