Dominic, Since this followed your very constructive and friendly reply to my summary of the options and willingness to swear off profits, I have tried to interpret your response herein in the best possible light. Likewise, I hope you will grant me the same consideration, just in case it is needed. ;)
On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 19:35 +0200, Dominic wrote: > On Wednesday 24 June 2009 19:04:37 Zach Welch wrote: > > Are you any of those things, today? Is he contributing, today? > > > > > Please respect MR. Dominic Rath. He is the CREATOR of OpenOCD 2004 > (with > > > 1-2 years or more of intensive coding) > > > > I do want to be clear that I do value and respect his contributions > and > > his copyrights, and I welcome both of you to continue contributing > to > > the OpenOCD community in the future. > > > > However, neither he nor you have contributed much constructive > lately, > > which means you have effectively abdicated your authority in the > > community. In an open source community, that authority derives from > > being a responsible and active contributor. Does this seem > reasonable? > > > > The OpenOCD was and always will be my project. I'm constantly > following the list, although I'm not able to read each and every post, > especially when the number of messages explodes like it did recently. If you mean it will always be yours in spirit, yes it will. You will always be the spiritual leader of the project. Your willingness to create this project and release it under the GPL has been appreciated by countless developers, and I never want to steal that thunder from you. You deserve to be enshrined in the OpenOCD community forever. However, you can simultaneously acknowledge that you have not been active on this list, so the "authority" that I spoke of your abdicating is of "command authority". The authority to lead the project to where the community needs to go, to manage the infrastructure, and to make executive decisions. Clearly, that last item needs to be clarified between the two of us directly. You are aware that I have been acting as a pro forma leader here, and these recent events saw me moving to take executive actions that I have experience to know were necessary and sufficient to protect the integrity of the OpenOCD IP for all of its contributors. [[When it comes to protecting copyrights, they matter more than users, because the contributors own their the rights to the code.]] Unfortunately, this process was complicated when you entered the debate on the side of an exception. You are still given tacit command authority, with the result being that you nearly led the road down an indefensible legal path. Your off-list threat to remove all of my changes from the repository further demonstrated that you still believe that you can wield absolute power without suffering any consequences. As I have said before now, that is no longer the case. When you use your authority, you effectively override other contributors and maintainers that have been working hard on the project. The rest of us must try to earn (or demand) respect from the community on a periodic basis. That is not a pure meritocracy; this status quo needs to change, with you accepting the same means of attaining privilege: by working on the trunk (or current release branches) and with the user community. Between multiple copyright holders and the GPL, the _only_ fair way to describe OpenOCD would be to say that it is *our* project, with the most active contributors leading the way in authority and responsibilities. In the face of abdication of command authority, the community should hold the project leaders accountable -- or replace them with new active contributors with equivalent authority. That should hold true for you, me, or anyone. Your opinions should always matter and be considered, but you are not as close to the code today as you once were. Authority needs to be in the hands of those who are actively working to improve and maintain the code for the community. If you are not reading every message, then I think those who do should have more authority than you. Does this sound fair? > I'm voicing my concerns when I see changes that interfere with some > key design ideas that were part of the original code I released. The > last issue was the removal of the asynchronous in handlers, which were > then reinstalled in a different way but achieving essentially the same > goal which was fine with me. I do think it is important to point out > how I wanted some things to be used when this isn't clear from the > code. > > I saw speculations about what I might have intended which is when I > first responded to the current issue. Being the one who followed the > project from its very beginning I believe I do know some things that > others may have missed or never heard about. I positively did _not_ mean that you have abdicated your "architectural authority" or knowledge of the system based on your unique experience. That would have been very big insult, but I fear that may be how you may have interpreted my use of that word. I apologize if that is the case, as you can see that was not my intention. Language often gets me into trouble, I fear. However, I hope that you will allow me to continue to lead the project forward into a new gilded age for OpenOCD. Your advice will always be welcome, but I will be disinclined to continue as a leader here without your clear delegation of command authority. With that, I cannot do what is necessary to keep the project moving forward on track. No one can. We have "lost" a week to the license debate; these kinds of distractions serious detract from the health of the community. We lost another solid contributor as a consequence of "discussing" these matters; I will always wonder how things might have turned out had there been better leadership, from myself included. Incidentally, am I to assume that I finally convinced you that just going with the GPL was the easiest (or most legally safe) path? :) Surely, your position on the socket-based drivers seems very pro-GPL, so I am very curious to what extent you were capitulating to "mob rule" when faced with all those angry faces behind the torches and pitchforks (virtually speaking). If you feel like answering at all, we can take this line of discussion off-list; no sense in stirring up more trouble. Cheers, Zach _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list Openocd-development@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
