The original message here was partly misleading, in talking only about “Fellows”. The actual new text reads:
A Member’s (including any Fellow’s) membership may be terminated for failure to meet any condition of membership (including violation of the Code of Conduct or non-payment of membership fees) by an affirmative vote of the majority of the Board of Directors.
I don’t know why Fellows are mentioned at all there - “Members” already covered that. So I assume this has not been reviewed by lawyers.
That aside, I’m not really concerned about comic book villains either. The PSF doesn’t have enough money to be worth fleecing.
A realistic danger in Open Source projects is an ambitious entrepreneur with a competing vision who wants to co-opt an existing project rather than do real work to sell the world their own fork. They absolutely want the ability to strip “old timers” of votes and visibility, to squash opposition. Over on the psf-vote mailing list, one old-timer wondered whether something like that was at work in
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the recent smashup in the NixOS community’s governance-evolution process: more than one long-term member was stripped of responsibility and / or position in what was purported to be a “CoC”-like dispute, but which seemed to my eyes more like a purge.
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No comic book villain in sight. They don’t want “root” to loot the treasury, let alone just to wreak havoc, but to run rm on core project members standing in their way. Indeed, like many true villains, they probably tell themselves they’re acting for the greater good of the world.
But, to be fair, they don’t really need (although it would sure help!) to infiltrate the Board to do that. Twisting “CoC-like” machinery to get the targets stripped of their commit bits, banned from posting on project sites, and barred from attending project events, is enough to render them invisible to most everyone else. Removing a symbolic label (like “Fellow” or “Member”) from their names too is comparatively useless.