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Matthew Garrett reports
The Linux Foundation is an industry organisation dedicated to promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software. The majority of its board is chosen by the member companies: 10 by platinum members (platinum membership costs $500,000 a year), 3 by gold members (gold membership costs $100,000 a year), and 1 by silver members (silver membership costs between $5,000 and $20,000 a year, depending on company size).
Up until recently, individual members ($99 a year) could also elect two board members, allowing for community perspectives to be represented at the board level. As of [January 18], this is no longer true.
The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors. Section 3.3(a) now says that no affiliate members may be involved in the election of directors, and section 5.3(d) still permits at-large directors but does not require them[2]. The old version of the bylaws are here--the only non-whitespace differences are in sections 3.3(a) and 5.3(d).
These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September [YouTube]. A short time later, the "Individual membership" program was quietly renamed to the "Individual supporter" program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped (compare the old page to the new one). Karen is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organisation involved in the vitally important work of GPL enforcement.
Roy Schestowitz at TechRights entitled his coverage
The Linux Foundation Has Become Like a Corporate Think Tank; Microsoft Influence Included
[Our extensive coverage of malfeasance at the European Patent Office] has prevented us from covering as much about the Linux Foundation as we used to, including payments from Microsoft, services to Microsoft, and abandonment of GPL enforcement efforts because GPL enforcers went after a Microsoft executives-run VMware.
Several of the places that covered this remarked about the extremely quiet nature of the process.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 24 2016, @02:28AM
That's a big pile of crap. I graduated college before the Millenial "brogrammers" took over the industry with their ugly, flat, anti-skeumorphic UIs, and before the term "coding" replaced "programming", and there were almost no women in CS and engineering back then either. It wasn't because of sexism, it was because women weren't interested. Women only had programming jobs back in the really old days when women weren't allowed to do "man's work", and programming was somehow considered on par with secretarial work. After the sexual revolution, women were allowed into lots of "men's" jobs like lawyering, doctors, etc. (instead of just legal assistants and nurses and aides), so smart women went into those professions, and mostly ignored engineering and CS, which were seem as the domain of geeks.
(Score: 1) by Deeo Kain on Sunday January 24 2016, @02:26PM
Programming never ever was "considered on par with secretarial work" in the past. Please provide any reference to prove your allegation.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 24 2016, @05:30PM
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/?no-ist [smithsonianmag.com]
From the article: "Now, it’s not that managers of yore respected women more than they do now. They simply saw computer programming as an easy job. It was like typing or filing to them and the development of software was less important than the development of hardware. So women wrote software, programmed and even told their male colleagues how to make the hardware better."