This is the first I'm hearing about drama with F-Droid. All I could find was a post on Hacker News which links to this github gist.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Reading the hacker News link, and the discussion there, we just don't have enough data. This feels like a nothing burger. If the public resignation post had actually detailed some problems that would be helpful....
Of course, it's all open source, so if a community member feels strongly enough they can fork everything run parallel infrastructure, with parallel binaries. And replace f droid.
The community board member who resigned, and maybe others who had previously resigned, could get together and start a fu-droid or something.
At this point, f Droid is repository agnostic, the canonical repository is just a normal repository with signing keys, so somebody could duplicate it, put in more strict requirements, reproducible only builds, updates within the last x months, at least this Android versioning level. Stuff like that
https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/446 here's another statement someone made. At this point, it looks like the Community Council was being (or saw itself as being) overridden. This defeated the purpose of the council, and attempts to fix this were (allegedly!) ignored, so three out of four members resigned.
Idk. Some human level drama. As long as reproducable builds keep working I don't care about their drama.
If fdroid dies, the 10 apps I use will move to some other platform, so I'm not worrying about it.
Putting on my large organization experience hat, in any group of people there's going to be conflict, you can tell the maturity and capability of the organization to handle it by how much drama they create in that conflict or how much they minimize it.
Mission focused organizations tend to be more resilient, because the drama is antithetical to the mission, so good leadership will sideline the drama and focus on the mission. In the normal business world that's money, and the open source world the mission can be more nebulous, a set of principles. I think the mission of droid is pretty clear, so that should help them stay the course.