Topic: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (Read 29579 times)

Greek city states didn't have governance on country scale, but they usually were centrally organized. Either ruled by a single person or by a small group of people.


Now, if you could provide some actual proof for these developments...
Most of the basis for our social norms were already written as history in the bible.
Even the egyptians had advanced social norms more than 5000 years ago.
So please tell us what social norms were invented by british anarchists in 500 AD that were unknown to other bigger previous civilizations.
It's not that i want to exclude anarchy, it just didn't play a very important role in creating these big societies that merged into the world market. There were no examples of large anarchies. If it is large it canot be purely an anarchy.
The whole point of getting centrally organized is to get past the limitations of anarchy.

Anarchy never managed to create a big stable complex society. All examples of anarchy deal with small numbers of people.
Governance emerges when such groups start to interact and fail to solve their conflicts.

So of course anarchy is the first and easiest way to organize yourself. But it has limits and does not scale.

good day sir please join our bitcoin cyberinfrastructure community for the arts and humanities...Ira

Nevermind those anarchistic city-states of Greece that spawned much of western philosophy and even the beloved democracy.  Or anarchistic post 500 AD England that developed our modern civil court system.  Or post 900AD Iceland, with it's vastly more efficient private protection systems, and violence levels on the order of those in America today.

I suppose if you ignore all the cases where anarchy was actually tried, and seemed to function spectacularly, you could totally claim that anarchy never worked anywhere™.  Of course, the reality is anarchy spawned most of the societal norms adopted by even governments today.  Allowing a multitude of social institutions to compete and iteratively improve raised the bar on their level of service so much that any institutions that claimed power had to adopt most of their rules discovered and formalized in anarchistic civilizations.

You clearly are not paranoia enough, so i fixed it for you..

Yeah, show me an anarchistical community that was stable enough to invent quantum mechancs or microprocessors or the internet...
I mean, you've got to love anarchy for advancing our society from tribal hunter-gatherer to the information age, right?
And history is written by the anarchist line running through the development of human society, right?

I don't know how to bring it to you but anarchy by itself cannot be sustained outside a well-rooted centralized system without breaking apart into pure violence. Anarchy, when push come to shove, means every man on his own.
I mean, all is rosy and peachy if the big rooted centralized system provides the anarchists with resources.
But what happens if you are hungry and noone wants to give you food and there is no government to force them to?
Well, as an anarchist you take the right in your own hands and take the damn food.
See the problem?

What happened here? I got a notification but the post isn't there anymore.

I think this is an excellent idea.

Guido Van Rossum is actually not the lead developer of the interpreter. It's been Barry Warsaw for a long time though IIRC it's lead by a group of people now. Guido INVENTED Python and pretty much leads its direction. He does very little actual development of any Python interpreter at the moment.

Linus developed the original Linux kernel and first "distro" and now he's lead maintainer of the Linux Kernel. He doesn't get to decide on the direction of Linux at this point. The community does. At this point, Ubuntu and Linux Mint have the most weight in directing Linux. Linus' decisions affect basically performance, security and compatibility. Debian, for instance, can run pretty much exactly the same on a BSD kernel, save for performance, security, compatibility and package support differences.

So no, I don't think your comparisons hold here.

Even if Gavin was Satoshi, it'd still be a completely different thing. We have bitcoind, bitcoin the official client, bitcoin the official blockchain and bitcoin the protocol. The latter two claim to have their main strength in not being centralised, according to the original paper. The last one is what really shapes "bitcoin the cryptocurrency."

Given the relationship between these elements, having a ruler of it all would equate it to Van Rossum getting to decide what can Python be used for or Linus deciding what can you install in your Linux machine. Invalid by definition.

Should Guido van Rossum call himself the lead developer of the Official Python language interpreter, and not the Python programming language? And Linus as well for the Official Mainline Linux Kernel instead of for the Linux Kernel? That seems very silly to me.

And sign their name. And even then it will likely fail, since anyone can sign your name.

Quoting some random person from here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/pfwqq/iama_request_gavin_andresen_lead_developer_of_the/

Queus (asking Gavin Andresen):

If the future of bitcoin depends on "one leader" then it can hardly be any more centralised. I suggest not to move in this direction.

Personal 'nonsense' is what makes and breaks great projects / companies. Communication is the variable that defines developer scalability. Without it, an idea simply becomes a team of one, and that does not scale. For the linux kernel, Linus has publicly selected code based on how much he can trust and rely on the developers who will be maintaining that code into the future. As well, accomplished managers at companies often times will fire one of their most talented developers if they have "lone coder" syndrome, and later look back to say it was an important move for their success. For developers trying to get an idea adopted, there is a recommended path: Get other people on board.

And they'd have to do that before being able to see any of your content?

I think at least you need to show that the visitor clicked on a checkbox to agree.

+1

+1

Someone should let him know that this:


is totally useless and has never stood up in court when challenged. I'm surprised people still even put that up.

Gavin is the only developer who objects to BIP 17 while you are the only developer who objects to BIP 16. The situation was a stalemate and the truth is that Gavin's opinion weighs more because he is the lead developer and has been trusted by both Satoshi and the whole community for a long time.

I don't think the personal stuff directed at you specifically means that much to be honest, it could have been anyone else in your place and Gavin still wins. It's how it's supposed to be, projects need a project leader. When there is a stalemate, project leader casts the deciding vote.

Now I think the best plan is to make sure BIP 16 is implemented as smoothly as possible. We need more than 55% of the network to be totally safe, at 55% there is still too high of a risk that there could be issues. It's basically up to Tycho now, most other pools are supporting BIP 16 as of now and he will basically decide when we have a go for enabling it.

Unfortunately, it looks like BIP 16 is going to prevail simply because of personal nonsense. Gavin is the only developer who actually objects to BIP 17.

This is exactly why we shouldn't look at popularity/reputation/trust within the community but look at the code and its merits. This is why I think popularity contests succeeding over merit put the whole system in question. Very especially when they are about changes in the blockchain.

Your stance is absolutely contradictory if you look at it this way. "Government agents" would be much smarter at "social engineering" than Luke who seems not to give a fuck about his "image" - much less so than Gavin for instance.

Any government "trojan horse" would do a much better job at not being vocal about the stances Luke's vocal about.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting a government to exist. I do think there are some things that government should do. And I do think that both government and Bitcoin should exist in the same time & place. What I said is that (with all else equal) a Bitcoin system that can function independently of what government system we live in is better than a Bitcoin system that depends on specific government enforced laws to function. Isn't that obvious? For example: If Bitcoin depended on some specific copyright law to function effectively and in Somalia there is no such copyright law, then Bitcoin won't function so well in Somalia.


If you see the full conversation, you will see that it's more likely real (real locations and bar name mentioned). But ya, it's not 100% sure of course.


Let me give you an example to explain why I think it's important to post these kinds of things.

Suppose Luke-jr is working as an agent for the US government. His mission: Cause Bitcoin to be more effectively controlled by the government. He can accomplish this by becoming a top Bitcoin developer and gaining reputation and trust from the Bitcoin community. He can then use this trust to make subtle changes to the Bitcoin protocol that favour government control. He can also use this trust to make statements on the forums and IRC rooms that brainwash people into taking up pro US government stances.

I obviously don't have enough evidence for this, but I'm sure it's likely that there some government agents in the Bitcoin community. Also, Luke-jr can simply be a person with no government ties and still somehow leveraging his reputation as a top developer to steer the Bitcoin community in the wrong direction. Who knows? I'm just sharing with you (the Bitcoin community) what I believe are red flags that should trigger more caution when trusting Luke-jr.

And yes, this doesn't have much to do with BIP 16 vs BIP 17, but so what? If you look at Gavin's first post you should see that the topic is "poisonous people in open source projects & luke-jr as such a person".