Karol Herbst has been a Nouveau driver developer for over a decade working on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. He went on to become employed by Red Hat. While he’s known more these days for his work on Mesa and the Rusticl OpenCL driver for it, he’s still remained a maintainer of the Nouveau kernel driver. But today he announced he’s resigning as a Nouveau driver maintainer due to differences with the upstream Linux kernel developer community.
Karol Herbst announced this morning he’s stepping down from his role as one of the upstream Nouveau kernel driver maintainers. This comes days after Hector Martin stepped down as an upstream Apple Silicon maintainer due to differences with the kernel development community.
Karol explained on the patch renouncing his Nouveau maintainership:
“I was pondering with myself for a while if I should just make it official that I’m not really involved in the kernel community anymore, neither as a reviewer, nor as a maintainer.
Most of the time I simply excused myself with “if something urgent comes up, I can chime in and help out”. Lyude and Danilo are doing a wonderful job and I’ve put all my trust into them.
However, there is one thing I can’t stand and it’s hurting me the most. I’m convinced, no, my core believe is, that inclusivity and respect, working with others as equals, no power plays involved, is how we should work together within the Free and Open Source community.
I can understand maintainers needing to learn, being concerned on technical points. Everybody deserves the time to understand and learn. It is my true belief that most people are capable of change eventually. I truly believe this community can change from within, however this doesn’t mean it’s going to be a smooth process.
The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:
“we are the thin blue line”
This isn’t okay. This isn’t creating an inclusive environment. This isn’t okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can’t be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.
I can’t in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.
I wish the best of luck for everybody to continue to try to work from within. You got my full support and I won’t hold it against anybody trying to improve the community, it’s a thankless job, it’s a lot of work. People will continue to burn out.
I got burned out enough by myself caring about the bits I maintained, but eventually I had to realize my limits. The obligation I felt was eating me from inside. It stopped being fun at some point and I reached a point where I simply couldn’t continue the work I was so motivated doing as I’ve did in the early days.
Please respect my wishes and put this statement as is into the tree. Leaving anything out destroys its entire meaning.
Respectfully
Karol”
Lyude Paul and Danilo Krummrich both of Red Hat remain Nouveau kernel maintainers. Red Hat developers are also working on developing NOVA as the new Rust-based open-source NVIDIA kernel driver leveraging the GSP interface for Turing GPUs and newer.
