How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People

[btc_artist]

For what it's worth, Gavin, you have my full support on this (not implying I'm anyone important in the project, just voicing an opinion).  Luke, you need to step back, take a breather.  As Mike said, you have lots of talent, but you need to work on your judgement.

[1713561941]

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[1713561941]

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[bitlane]

Wow.....
People really need to watch this video before they comment further to defend Luke-Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE

[paraipan]

Wow.....
People really need to watch this video before they comment further to defend Luke-Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE

When you have money involved, trust is out of the question so we're left with politeness, respect and humility.

edit: very good points in that video http://youtu.be/ZSFDm3UYkeE?t=20m32s

[Andrew Vorobyov]

Luke, you need to step back, take a breather

It's not called to step back... it's called step forward... because our goal is more important than us.

The only thing I can "find on" Luke - other developers do not support his idea...

[jimbobway]

how socially normal he is.... WTF is this... how sick one must be to say things like this...

Luke's behavior on this matter is simply impecable... I can not find any cavity in his position on this matter...

As much I want to break free from position we are stuck in, but I can't dismiss what this guy says...

All of you, developers, are great people... I hope we will go through these days with lot of experience and it will make us stronger as community.

How are personal issues relevant to choosing the right technical solution again? Maybe we should invite your normal babysitter, what he/she has to say in this, if that is a relevant metric_  Wink

The concept of "team" is very important in all organizations and maybe even more so in open source projects.  Team interaction and communication is key.  If a person cannot communicate, lay down his ego, or continually brings up old issues then the whole team breaks down resulting in software paralysis.

[anu]

Gavin, I think you should separate 2 issues. This is not about an Opensource Project called "Official Bitcoin Client". The client is not really important - it's a reference implementation, nothing more. This is really about the *standard* any client must implement.

The movie you linked to is only about how an Opensource Project should deal with, what they call, "poisonous" people. But this simply is not about code. Perfectionism can be an impediment when it comes to code, but when it comes to a standard, perfectionism is essential.

I can't judge the BIPs for their merit, but it seems to me that this new standard did not have sufficient time to mature yet. Maybe the current quarrel should be looked at as a constructive effort to enhance a standard that is, in my humble understanding, revolutionary. You must get it right the first time. Please take your time!

[tvbcof]

Wow.....
People really need to watch this video before they comment further to defend Luke-Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE

Amir Taaki's comment from a year ago was unimpressive to me.  Of course I do not know if that is the Intersango Amir Taaki or not.

[genjix]

The concept of "team" is very important in all organizations and maybe even more so in open source projects.  Team interaction and communication is key.  If a person cannot communicate, lay down his ego, or continually brings up old issues then the whole team breaks down resulting in software paralysis.

Nope. Bitcoin is not a team. It is many teams in a community and part of a process. In project development, relationships aren't always and sometimes shouldn't be cordial.

For instance a regulator and the company they are overseeing, should not have a cordial relationship. Or upstream and downstream if they are functioning properly will have a contentious relationship; I've had some vicious past arguments with downstream before but we remained amicable and professional while disagreeing.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_projects#Tips_On_Upstreaming_Patches

Many of the characterisations I see people making all the time comparing bitcoin to a business, a team or charity (to name a few) are unrealistically simple and naive.

[simonk83]

In the longer run, I feel it might boil down to losing one of them (at least from the core team) over this disagreement. It's easy for us to ask them to sort it out peacefully, but sometimes different personality types just don't get along and shouldn't work together.

My worst fear is Gavin would leave because Luke wouldn't. I can't imagine a worse thing happening to Bitcoin right now...
This is n-th call to action by Gavin on forums these days and I think we should listen.

I agree.   If one of them needs to go, there's no doubt in my mind that it should be Luke, absolutely.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that all the core devs agreed on BIP 16 initially, but Luke was away at the time.  Upon his return, he disagreed with 16 and all this crap happened as a result.   From my perspective, I don't understand how it was allowed to get this far if only one person from a team of devs disagreed with the proposal.   The majority was in favour of it, therefore it should have been accepted as far as I'm concerned.

[casascius]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that all the core devs agreed on BIP 16 initially, but Luke was away at the time.  Upon his return, he disagreed with 16 and all this crap happened as a result.   From my perspective, I don't understand how it was allowed to get this far if only one person from a team of devs disagreed with the proposal.   The majority was in favour of it, therefore it should have been accepted as far as I'm concerned.

My guess is that [Tycho] is ultimately the person with the most control over the final say, and he is choosing to not act at this point.  If he changes his mind, this will probably be a done deal.

[Serge]

testnet both and decide on which is better in 6-12month ?

[Andrew Vorobyov]

We have proverb in x-USSR after WWII (doubt a lot of people follow it now) "We,Russians, don't abandon our people"

If Luke wants Bitcoin to succeed, if he is putting effort into it he is "our" guy... You can not simply "boot off" him from Bitcoin bus.

We have a SAME goal but different views on it... if we will boot off people like this - nobody will be there to reach it...

We must find a way how to solve this rumble, but don't say "he must step back"...

Fuck - let this Bitcoin to be what it is and write new, better Bitcoin, I don't know... This will be an achievement and not a life hack!

[MoonShadow]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that all the core devs agreed on BIP 16 initially, but Luke was away at the time.  Upon his return, he disagreed with 16 and all this crap happened as a result.   From my perspective, I don't understand how it was allowed to get this far if only one person from a team of devs disagreed with the proposal.   The majority was in favour of it, therefore it should have been accepted as far as I'm concerned.

My guess is that [Tycho] is ultimately the person with the most control over the final say, and he is choosing to not act at this point.  If he changes his mind, this will probably be a done deal.

Somewhat true.  The developers can decide to make whatever changes that they want, but if the majority of the miners do not support the changes, then it doesn't matter much what the developers actually want.  So it really comes down to convincing enough pool owners and miners that the change is worthwhile.  However tech savvy the miners may be, they are not all developers themselves, and dissent among the development team seeds confusion among the miners.  Tycho's insistence for more time, in light of some dissent, is a wise man's opinion.  I, for one, don't know enough about programming to even know what I'm looking at, so I (personally) have to trust someone.  I favor Gavin because he was knighted by Satoshi long ago, for good or bad.  It's entirely possible that I'm in error doing so, but if this is really a near-term security issue, then something must change and Gavin is (IMHO) the commander of necessary changes.  Even if a near term bug fix isn't forthcoming, a checkpoint update every few days would be prudent.  Of course, that means that we would need someone qualified to actually monitor the blockchain with human eyes to make sure that there have been no attempts to capitalize on this bug before releasing the next checkpoint upgrade, but at least then it won't be required that everyone participate, since if there is an attack that screws up the blockchain, a valid copy of it will still exist somewhere on the network that will allow us to contain damage.

[Rassah]

We have proverb in x-USSR after WWII (doubt a lot of people follow it now) "We,Russians, don't abandon our people"

I though this was funny ironic anecdote, not proverb? We Russians abandoned a lot of people, and then just honored them as fallen heroes, because it is easier (or because we decided they were traitors).
As for Bitcoin, it is idea, not just a open source program. If Gavin quits, or whole development team disappears, someone else will step up. The only dispute is how quickly the team we do have can work, make new feature, and fix bug, if one member keeps bringing everyone else down.
TL;DR Luke does not seem to be a good comrade.

[RaggedMonk]

My guess is that [Tycho] is ultimately the person with the most control over the final say, and he is choosing to not act at this point.  If he changes his mind, this will probably be a done deal.

 Tycho's insistence for more time, in light of some dissent, is a wise man's opinion. 

At first I thought Tycho was being stubborn or taking his fellow pool-operators side out of some kind of loyalty, but I now agree with him that we should give it more time.  Another month or two of testing to calm the FUD is more valuable then getting multisig functionality right now.

Luke is brash and seems a bit arrogant, but I think his heart is in the right place.  I don't think he needs to be excommunicated by any means, but it wouldn't hurt for him to cool down a bit.

[Luke-Jr]

Finally got time to actually watch the video, so here are my comments:

• There isn't any constant back-and-forth revision of BIP 17 going on. This was a one-time critical fix to replace a major proposed change with a minor one that does it better.
• I think a clear mission goal would help bitcoind/Bitcoin-Qt tremendously. But let's not get caught up in another debate over what that should be. I suggest Gavin make the first and final decision for bitcoind's goal, and Wladimir the same for Bitcoin-Qt.
• I think this constantly opening new threads for the same topic (I think we have like 10 on P2SH now?) is probably the same as the "filibustering" mentioned. Can we stop doing that? (I subscribe to one to stay up on the topic, and next thing I know there's a new 3-page thread going on about the same thing that I missed!)
• I commend Gavin, sipa, et al with seeking peer review of their own changes despite having direct push access so we don't need the git commit emails. I'm questioning whether this is really on-topic, but that's possibly a flaw of my own speaking
• This whole P2SH thing has been stressing me out a bit, and this "bus factor" thing seems like a good idea. That is, after this is resolved, I intend to at least try to be "hit by a bus" and take a break for a while. (Note: I'll still be reachable if there are problems involving my code that need resolving - ie, I'm not expecting the other developers to deal with bugs I create, if it turns out there are some)
• It would be nice to switch to a more consensus-based approach for development.
• P2SH isn't "voting on everything"; this is the first thing we've had to have any kind of serious vote over.
• I did admittedly start off simply opposing BIP 16 and expecting that someone else would fix it. I noticed this, so I wrote, implemented, and tested BIP 17 to provide a solution (doing something).
• Anyone want to make a wiki page documenting past decisions? I've only been involved for a year, so I'm not sure I'm qualified.
• I think they make a good point about not making decisions on IRC. A common thing put forward for BIP 16 seems to be that it was discussed at the IRC meeting and proposed based on that. But according to these guys, that's when the "real" discussion begins, it shouldn't be treated as a final conclusion.

To conclude, I think this video has a lot of good advice; I don't appreciate Gavin trying to make the P2SH dispute personal and imply the disagreement makes me a problem - that part is a distraction and non-productive.

[bitlane]

I've read many of the developer logs from Bitcoin and I must say I'm surprised this hasn't really come to a head earlier. If you read luke-jrs response to pretty much anything he disagrees with he does the "you do that and I'm not going to mine it" approach. "If you do that I'm going to fork the chain" . Basically turning every minor problem into a major one and using his pool as his body guard.

Does anyone actually think Luke-Jr is a positive presence? Attacking other currencies, filing false claims to hosts, inserting religious text into Bitcoin and finally holding Bitcoin development team to ransom to stall development? With that sort of positive presence I'm glad he's over here rather than focusing on SolidCoin.

+1

The balance of luke's contributions to the whole bitcoin ecosystem is strongly negative AFAIC.

Not to mention the fact that Luke has tagged the header of EVERY piece of code he has ever laid his hands on, should be a STRONG indication that he is not in this to be a Team Player, but rather to gain as much Solo recognition as possible.

As I said previously, everyone who hasn't yet, really needs to watch the video in the OP, as you would swear that the commentary can be applied 100% to Luke-Jr without ever mentioning his name or the Bitcoin project.

All of the tell-tale signs are there.
- He is childish and throws tantrums (ie. Wiki edits).
- He uses his Pool as leverage against this and other communities.
- He is extremely argumentative.
- He is an attention whore (code tagging etc) and is NOT a team player.
....and the list goes on.

As was said previously, if one person NEEDED TO GO and it came down to Gavin or Luke, my vote would be to keep Gavin.
I to am afraid that Gavin would quit the project if faced with constant battles etc from Luke and others should be as well.

Would YOU trust Luke with the present as well as future of your Bitcoins ?

Should being a Developer and a Pool operator not be considered a conflict of interest, when using your pool to help FORCE things your way ?

Perhaps it's time to show his dedication to the community and retire from 1 of the 2 roles (Pool OP or Dev) ?

[Luke-Jr]

Just thought I should note that I am intentionally ignoring znort987, CoinHunter, and bitlane, who have demonstrated themselves to be scammers and trolls in the past. If anyone else thinks I need to respond to anything from them, please say so (do note that a good amount of it is outright lies/FUD).

[casascius]

I am trusting that Tycho will wait for us to all calm down, eventually review this thread, determine that the consensus is clearly with Gavin, and run with it.

[bitlane]

Just thought I should note that I am intentionally ignoring znort987, CoinHunter, and bitlane, who have demonstrated themselves to be scammers and trolls in the past. If anyone else thinks I need to respond to anything from them, please say so (do note that a good amount of it is outright lies/FUD).

Everything I have referred to has been proven BEYOND the shadow of a doubt, on multiple occasions, so do your best.

Also, had I actually been on your ignore list, how did you know that I was commenting about your actions in the first place ?