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You don't strike me as confrontational and I hope my reply didn't sound aggrieved. This is a very interesting topic to me and one that I'm very grateful you are willing to share your views on...because you clearly have a lot of experience in the FOSS realm and the Bitcoin realm. Text is very low bandwidth, and so it is hard to gauge tone some times. But I do not find your notes confrontational in the least.
The point you make about a single repo being a necessarily hierarchical structure is excellent. And it is confusing to me that two or three years ago (whenever burak broke btcd) and there was some small momentum for an interest in alternative clients, the popular response was one of: "we must match the reference client bug for bug."
But even if we venture down a path with several real implementations of Bitcoin, the speculation of my earlier response was that users probably won't achieve much good by concerning themselves with the inner clique drama of whatever project they choose to use.
Life may be better for us all if we adopt a culture that has the attitude that those who haven't put in the work really look crude or impolite when they concern themselves with the gossip.
Life may be better for us all if we adopt a culture that has the attitude that those who haven't put in the work really look crude or impolite when they concern themselves with the gossip.
Similarly, if Jon’s work spoke for itself, he wouldn’t be out there whining about being treated unfairly every week, would he? Then Hodlonaut would also reference the amazing contributions Jon made by name rather than to only point at his commit count.
I appreciate Atack's recent statements. He seems yo be a person who has put in the work and so I wouldn't call it "whining."
I'm less convinced that Hodlonaut has the grounds to evaluate some of this drama.
My point isn't that no one should talk about it, but rather that I will evaluate the opinions of people who speak about Core drama with the lens of how seriously they have contributes to the project.
Look not only at superficial statistics, but also open some of his reviews and pull requests. You will see pattern: first small documentation fix, chasing typo fix, then Concept ACK with little “nit” suggestions for improvement. It is looking very good on github profile and for grant applications, but does not give much excitement to other core developers…
you clearly have a lot of experience in the FOSS realm and the Bitcoin realm
I'm just another a-hole that took the "verify" part to heart really. You see, the most amazing thing in the entire story of jonatack is that it took 2 years for him to be really worked against. I wouldn't last 2 weeks before being puked out.
users probably won't achieve much good by concerning themselves with the inner clique drama
Agreed, but the keyword in there is drama. I truly do think that the process should be monitored. And wrong moves be called out. Because you don't establish trust during the good times, but in those of crisis. And you still want to verify in an ongoing matter anyway, this is Bitcoin.
Life may be better for us all if we adopt a culture that has the attitude that those who haven't put in the work really look crude or impolite when they concern themselves with the gossip.
Or at least care more about informed opinions.
Maybe I come off as confrontational - probably I am, haha. But it's not personal, so please don't take it that way.
I'm not saying that everyone should review code. If you want to trust the process wherein others review the code, then you review the process. This is a perfectly understandable thing for people that don't read the code. But I fear that this too is too much for many. How sovereign are you if you didn't test the process you trust? Do you like finding out that 2 people that did a lot of work on reviewing code - the ones that protect the integrity of the software and therefore are needed for the process - are feeling worked against? Doesn't matter that these aren't the most polite people that ever existed; you simply need people that do the work, and then disagree with you - that's also what Adam Back was trying to say, I think, in the quotes of the article.
Thing is, all this happened years ago. I remember it clearly because there was a much larger process thing going on around that time, about "maintainers with a specific portfolio". This type of subject area focus works with Linux as that's a hierarchical structure, but it doesn't work with orgs without centralized leadership. Everyone has their expertise but top tier maintainership cannot be discriminative and you don't get to work on the things you like as a maintainer. You can if you're a lieutenant of Linus, you cannot if there is no hierarchy and you're one of the n top dogs, because you share the burden between everyone for the whole, not just for your own shop. Everything that goes wrong is on the whole group.
And this exactly is a process thing, so it is of interest specifically for those that don't read code. For me, it doesn't matter much because I just read the code (though I was interested in the organization because I have a FOSS non-organization of my own to reflect.) So if this is realized only now, then the process wasn't monitored really, and it just becomes some blame game drama (no matter what the author intended.)
Also note that this shouldn't in any way be a disqualifier of the competence of maintainers in terms of maintenance. Just the organization per definition sucks if it's unorganized. I don't know anyone that got this right. I don't know of any project of significance that got to be unorganized, or democratic, or otherwise decentralized. And it's because the repo structure forces some centralization. IMHO, the only way to decentralize (the protocol) is to have "competing" implementations, not decentralize a single implementation. But... maybe I am wrong. Multiple implementations isn't a silver bullet either.