The following text is by Ruairi Fullam, I'll post my comment after it.
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Emmett Plant is due to leave the Xiphophorus project within a week. It was a decision made by other partners in Xiph. I personally feel that this is a major blow to Xiph - Emmett, in my opinion was an excellent ambassador, and within the time he had been CEO, over $60,000 was raised to finance the company, strategic relationships were forged with big media players like RealNetworks and On2 and generally raising awareness for Ogg Vorbis.

There are also many other acheivements Emmett helped with, but I think the main thing for me was definately the fact that he was right in the community - always a person who would be happy to take a phone call at 4am in the morning, chat on IRC, or keep you informed on your legal status. He'd also motivate people by being incredibly accomodating. Some people may have tangled with him on the odd occasion, but Emmett lived and breathed the company philosophy and I attribute a lot of the enthusiasm that I have for audio technologies upon the efforts he had made.

I personally wish Emmett the very best for the future, and although I still support Xiph Corperation, I feel it will never quite be the same and the next CEO, whoever that may be will have some job trying to fill the hole that Emmett will leave. For sure, whatever Emmett moves onto, if he manages to have the enthusiasm he had for Xiph - we'll definately hear about it!

- Ruairi (rc55)
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I have to personally agree with Ruairi. Whether you like Emmett or not, one can't deny the fact that Emmett has been doing the job in Xiph with all his heart. It's very likely that you won't find any other CEO who is ready to discuss with everybody in phone,email or IRC practically anytime, or write songs about the products you present, so in many ways Emmett was a very special CEO.

Xiph foundation will lose a valuable person, who not only made Xiph more colorful and gave it a unique personality, but also with his personal effort very much made Vorbis and other Xiph's products familiar to people looking for free multimedia solutions.

Knowing how much Emmett did for Xiph, I really find it unfortunate that he was voted off by the Xiph board of directors. Though I can't know all the reasons behind this, I must question, was this the right or in anyway wise decision by the Xiph board, especially now that Xiph is trying to push its products to masses and hardware-manufacturers mainly using the contacts made by Emmett.

Though Emmett hasn't yet signed the final contract before leaving, (the reason this has not yet been made officially public by Xiph, although this has been "semi-public" for over 4 days now) what happened seems inevitable.

Good luck, Emmett, for the future, and don't lose your will to put all your heart to what ever you decide to pursue next.
I hope despite what happens, the Xiph Foundation keeps strongly pursuing its efforts to bring the best possible free multimedia to the public.
Thank you.

- JohnV
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Emmett has posted an update on his weblog here:
http://skepticity.blogspot.com/

Wasn't he bringing Ogg Vorbis to iRiver? What luck

I don't really know much about him, since I haven't been in the game for long(first 'real' computer I got in june 2, 2002, discovered Ogg Vorbis in August, came here in Janruary), but he did have a lotta enthusiam with iRiver and helped a lot, good luck to him. B)

wow.

Sorry to hear about such a great force behind Vorbis leaving.

Damn I started to miss the late night IRC chats till 7AM. I was contemplating getting back in it with him. I will have to find out where he is off to. I remember IIRC on this very forum someone posting how Emmet would be the end of Xiphophorus and how he had supposedly been a liability at sourceforge etc. I would like to think he more than proved that wrong.

We could not always agree. But that is part of what made it fun. He was a very dynamic guy who could take you by surprise by his sheer raw energy. Whoever was chosen to replace him will have some big shoes to fill. I hope it was done for the right reasons and wish Emmett good luck for the future. If anything he was the perfect guy to get the ball rolling over at Xiph. I guess it is time to switch over to traditional "suit" mode.

Emmett has posted on his blog about this situation:
http://skepticity.blogspot.com/

Hey, I'd like to thank the people above for their kind words and wishes of success. I'll miss working on this stuff, and I'll even miss the terrifying community of audiophiles at HA.

If you want to keep in touch, write me a nastygram or offer me a job, just drop a note to emmett@funkbunny.com. Thanks again!

Emmett

Sorry to hear this news.

I agree with the sentiments expressed above; Xiph will have a hard time finding someone else who's as energetic pushing Ogg to the masses, corporations, etc.

On a related topic, is there any information about the Xiph organization's operation available openly? Are the board of directors elected? Who are they? The only information I can find on Xiph.org are 5 contact addresses: http://xiph.org/contact/ Are these the five people on the board?

I don't know the Xiph structure, or who the members of this board is.
But Xiph and Emmett are to me like a PC and it's user.
Remove the user, and the PC does not operate. Emmett is/was an awesome user.
A public icon for Xiph. A great representative.

No, I'll stop my speech here. All I know is, it's downright stupid to sack Emmett from Xiph.org.
Will this mean a stagnation in the development and progress of Vorbis?

Who is gonna take over, where Emmett left?

Questions remains unanswered.
This xiph board is truely clueless.

Not all of them, the Xiph board of directors members are:

Christopher "Monty" Montgomery
Jack Moffitt
Patrick Mahoney
Mike Person
Jon Callaghan

First, I'll just remind you that Monty is also on the board, which means that he was probably involved in the decision too. I don't know everything that's going on but both sides have their wrongs in this story. It's not all black & white.

Yeah, hopefully Xiph.org will come out with some sort of official announcement soon. Perhaps also some information on what they're planning to do next, since obviously they need some sort of replacement. It'll also be interesting to figure out whether Monty was one of the 4 or the 1 in the 4-1 vote.

w00t

Does it mean Emmett is NOT CEO anymore,but still IN Xiph ,or he is kicked out :x




please forgive for my English,it's not my native languague

Good luck with whatever you do Emmett, I'm sure 'CEO of Xiphophorous' will work wonders when put on your curriculum vitae

I hope this isn't the end of either party involved, although I could see Xiph floundering before Emmett - with the magnetism & warmth I hear about from people involved with him there is limitless potential

that is what i wanted to know too..

EDIT. I don't want to speculate about the voting distribution unless there's something official. The 3/4-1 was also only speculative number by a Xiph "employee". He later said it's just if not even more likely that the voting was unanimous. What really only counts is the final outcome of the voting..

I know Monty, I've known (past tense since I haven't heard anything from him in over a year) Jack Moffit, but who the hell are those other 3?

Well, it does seem quite sad that trouble over at Xiph must come from the inside. I would otherwise think that Xiph would be assaulted from the outside by the likes of Microsoft and other anti-opensource opponents.

Maybe the 4 on the Xiph board have been, ahem, 'influenced' by the commercial proponents of aac? After all ogg vorbis is a direct competitor...

Let's not start totally BS speculation...

wow thats really bad news :'(

I don't know where JohnV got his 4-1, and I know nothing about it anyway. However, I really doubt the board would go against what Monty thinks is good.

lol

I'll add this to my list of favorite conspiracy theories



Just a small thought - could have nothing to do with Xiph - I hope you will get me right - open source and non-for-profit projects are usually having problems on personal level inside management while big companies usually care for income and problems usually originate from the amount of income only. That's the difference of "problems inside" between those two types of entities.

I hope Xiph team will still work hard on Ogg multimedia, after all - competition is what generates progress.

I already answered this above. The figure came from a Xiph "employee". I first got the impression that it wasn't speculative (although I still wrote "afaik"), but seems it was pretty much speculative after all. This is not really important anyway, although it would be interesting. The only important thing was the outcome.

I'd rather wait until an official notice about change on the top is issued by Xiph.org, these numbers can be just wild speculations.

Bah, that sucks.

Oh and BTW...


Somebody should change this

Hi.

First off, we're not saying anything yet because the exact terms of severance and departure ARE NOT SIGNED. Volunteers within the org, outside developers, several inappropriate public statements and people generally getting all hotheaded about something they don't know a single damned thing about have only made this worse. If you can't imagine how we could possibly want to let Emmett go, well, then, you don't have an informed soapbox to stand on. This isn't Slashdot.

We will make an official announcement THE SECOND SOMETHING IS OFFICIAL. In addition, the organization paperwork and its books are public; anyone can request that information. We will be preemptively posting all that information here in a bit to avoid you folks facing any paperwork hassles.

Now, as for "who the Hell is this shadow board?" the first thing you should know is that I'm on it, and I voted with the board to terminate Emmett. Don't bitch at some dark force about this. Bitch at me.

Back to the board. Second: You all should know Jack Moffitt. He wrote Icecast, among other things. He's been working with us since '99.

Third person is Patrick Mahoney, founder of Green Witch Internet Radio, once upon a time the very first corporate sponsor Xiph had. He adopted and promoted Vorbis in the industry at a time no one would give us the time of day. He's been around since Jack.

Fourth is Mike Person, the only other active member who's been in Xiph with me from the beginning. Likely, none of you remember the original as Xiph.com. Mike and I started it in 1994. He's been handling inglorious paperwork of the various company incarnations ever since.

Fifth board member is Jon Callaghan, who was brought in by Patrick.

If you have specific questions about Xiph, please ask them. I'm not going to answer questions about the reasoning behind the Emmett decision.

Monty

Monty I don't think anyone is blasting you or Emmet. It seems you both made a fairly good combination. But things change. Goals change. Needs change. Which I am assuming is causing the change. All I wish for on this is success for you both and to not part on bad terms.

Xiphophorus is after all a business. Whatever the reason was I am sure they were business related and not personal. So don't frett to much.

Well, to be pedantic, it seems there has been an official decision (complete with an official vote by the board) to fire Emmett as CEO of Xiph.org, which seems to be something worth announcing. Unless I'm missing something, the only thing not official is the exact terms of the severance, which probably none of us care too much about.

Your prerogative, and I'm not criticizing, but I'd think there'd be a little less opacity in a company that does Open Source software. Or will reasoning come in time as well?

"We have been advised not to comment"

Actually, let me soften that a bit. People are concerned, and they want to know things. The simple fact is... I can't say. Not that I won't, but any premature comment I make, as a person or in the name of the Org, can only complicate the process.



Same content, less inflammatory:

I will likely never comment in detail on Emmett leaving. It's between him and Xiph.
The fact is, it's not all that interesting... but it's still no one else's business.

Emmet, I wish you a lot of luck. You are talented and determined, you can bring any projects to its success. I hope we'll have new pajama crisis songs more frequently

Good luck Emmett !

I wasn't demanding anything. I specifically meant to make a point: How on earth do you expect people to trust you with their product, source code, when you refuse to be forthcoming about the sacking of a passionate, respected team member?

Really, I don't care about your reasons for the firing. It just seems paradoxical to expect openness from others (especially when dealing with their product) and not return the favour when asked. I'm not meaning to start an argument. I'm just curious.

As a side-note, it's not like asking "how a stranger likes to fuck". It's more like asking an aquaintance why they broke up with their girlfriend. There are no legal activities I can think of that could be analogized to interpersonal intercourse with any level of accuracy. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Edit: Your new post answers what I was asking. Thank you.

I assume the pronouns here are pointing in odd grammatical directions. If not...

I wrote that product. I put all of my own money into this project. Who has to trust who?

Monty

I'd suggest people to calm down a little....

You have to understand that a decision inside the Xiph company is a business decision, not a personnal one.
On a business level, you always have to make some choices and to take some decisions. This is totally separate from the personnal level.

I think that either Monty or Emmett can not and should not comment here (personnally) about a business decision not yet announced.

I respect your decision not to explain all this story, but i can't undestand why it's only your business, and not ours.

After all, in this way even vorbis could become "no one else's business", don't you think?

OMG that was your 666th post.

Seriously.. It's interesting to see what the comments are gonna be after the official announcement. Eveybody who knows Emmett knows that there may be deeper reasons than just strictly business, although business is probably part of it.
Emmett did bring lots of funds and Xiph is a non-profit corporation, and nobody denies he's a good salesman... Sure, it's the easiest to say that it's strictly business, nothing personal, and that may be depending on a director. Monty seems to know what he's doing.

Maybe it's better not to speculate publicly this so much. On the otherhand Xiph is a unique corporation in a way that it has lots of loyal supporters who know lots of things of their favorite fish, because the Xiph-guys share lots if information of what they are doing and people interact with them a lot. I'm sure everybody has some opinion of what happened and why. Now, this is a new situation when information is not freely flowing, 3 out of 5 board members turn out to be in the main part, but who are practically unknown to the Xiph fans who otherwise know a lot, and everybody keeps just whispering.

I wish Emmett all the best from my side, no doubt he was investing a lot of time and working hard for Xiph, i wished i could invest the same amount of time into the development of our little project as he could do for Xiph .... still i cant help but see Monty as the driving force behind Xiph, and we all have to accept this decision i guess .... as Monty said, we dont know all the background, and it wouldnt be right to announce in public, as these are clearly private matters ....

The thing is, allmost all important development is done by Xiph itself. Vorbis may be an open source project, there are actually very few outside contributors. So they don't really have to care about what outside people think about internal decisions.

I'd imagine if a singnificant amount of contributions came from outside, such a decision would have to be much more open, but right now, there probably isn't a need to.

Agreed: probabily there isn't the need.
The point here is not "who's who" or "why they kicked Emmett": as monty said it's "no one else's business".

But..

I'm just unhappy about this and now I trust xiph a little less than before.
My ethic impose me to motivate my decisions (at work, developing software...): it's a different point of view.

So would it make me happier if the Xiph board exposed all the gory details right now on HA, thus risking lawsuits and things like that? I'm a Xiph developer, I'm not on the board, I don't know the details, and I'm not sure knowing them would really help me. If that had been taken against Monty's will, that could have been a different matter, but right now I don't see what it matters. Does it really matter if you heard the story after all the agreements are signed and everything's announced officially?

Because it began as a dry business decision that quickly became personal, unprofessional and nasty.

In any case, it turns out what I'm allowed to say is not restricted, so I'll offer a sanitized version... mainly because no one will let this go until I do.

a) There was most definately a huge personality conflict between Emmett and the board (a majority of the board). We're far too small an organization to have members effectively not talking to one another because they just can't get along. This wasn't sudden; the problem has persisted most of the past year.

b) There were budgetary constraints (bookeeping numbers to appear). Emmett asked for more money, and we (the board) decided we couldn't afford it. We offered a short-term compromise raise which Emmett rejected. At this point, Emmett made noise about leaving if we couldn't meet his demands.

c) Emmett told the world he was being pushed out.

d) People started snowing the board with email offering mediation, petitions to keep Emmett, and conspiracy theories about how we'd been taken over by commercial interests.

e) In the interests of keeping a private matter private, we kept our mouths shut.

Sorry folks, we're not going to email the enumerated list of grievance bulletpoints. Airing it will only be a distraction that keep escalating and leaves everyone feeling like they didn't *really* need to know. It's over, let's move on.

Oh, and it's now quite official. We're finishing the press release.

Why risking lawsuits?

Thanks Monty for the explanation.
Now the situation is clearer than before.

If terms of severance specify no divulgence, blabbing gory details gets you sued.

Didn't realize that.
Thanks.

There's no need to keep discussing this issue any more imho. That's the way it. Let's just move one wishing everybody the best, hoping that the good things are ahead...

I'd be very interested to hear how Xiph's plan are now .... will there be a new CEO ? Will Monty and the board handle things alone ? Too early to ask for that ?

I'd recommend to bring somebody on board who is more respecting the Windows world, but that may just be my personal opinion on this subject. Its ok if the leadinh developer does the core stuff on Linux or any other OS, but the CEO, in who's responsibility it is to make sure the format gets widely adopted and used, should care a lot to make sure there are perfect Windows implementations of all Xiph products, however big the hatress against M$ may be ... that doesnt change the fact that most of the potential Vorbis users are on this OS. I cant understand why there is still no 'official' Vorbis DirectShow filter in the Xiph CVS ( AFAIK ) ....

No. I made a mistaken assumption. I didn't know the level of modification non-Xiph people had done to Vorbis, and assumed that it was kept afloat at least in part by donations.

Thanks for the explanation, Monty. I think most of us are probably satisfied and don't need to know any more now. As with everyone else, I'd be interested to know what Xiph is planning to do in the future though (both in terms of personnel and in terms of software).