pyjamas / pyjs

[alex23]

Anyone else following the apparent hijack of the pyjs project from its
lead developer?

[james hedley]

On Thursday, 3 May 2012 12:52:36 UTC+1, alex23 wrote:
> Anyone else following the apparent hijack of the pyjs project from its
> lead developer?

Yes, me. The guy now in control got the owner of the domain name to turn it over to him, which is probably ok legally, but he had no public mandate or support. As far as I can see from the mailing list, only 3 or 4 out of the 650 subscribers actively support his actions. He's a long time contributor and genuinely seems quite talented. However there's no getting away from the fact that he's done this undemocratically, when he could have forked the project. To my mind he hasn't made a good enough reasoned justification of his arguments and he's coming across as being very defensive at the moment.

The former leader, Luke Leighton, seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth but I mailed him yesterday and he's on holiday so trying not to pay too much attention to it at the moment.

There's also an allegation, which I am not making myself at this point - only describing its nature, that a person may have lifted data from the original mail server without authorisation and used it to recreate the mailing list on a different machine. *If* that were to be true, then the law has been broken in at least one country.

I'm arguing that there should be a public consultation over who gets to run this project and I'm also thinking of making a suggestion to the python software foundation or maybe other bodies such as the FSF (I'm not a FOSS expert but they were suggested by others) that they host a fork of this project so that we can have a legitimate and stable route forward.

The problem for me with all this is that I use pyjamas in a commercial capacity and (sorry if this sounds vague but I have to be a bit careful) there are probably going to be issues with our clients - corporate people distrust FOSS at the best of times and this kind of thing will make them run for the bloody hills.

In fact, there appear to be a lot of "sleeper" users who make a living out of this stuff and the actions of the new de-facto leader has jeopardised this, pretty needlessly in our opinion.

James

[james hedley]

By the way, there's a lot more to say on this, which I'll cover another time. There are arguments for and against what's happened; at this stage I'm just trying to flag up that there is *not* unanimity and we are not just carrying on as normal.

[Duncan Booth]

james hedley <jamesk...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There's also an allegation, which I am not making myself at this point
> - only describing its nature, that a person may have lifted data from
> the original mail server without authorisation and used it to recreate
> the mailing list on a different machine. *If* that were to be true,
> then the law has been broken in at least one country.
>

I don't know whether they moved it to another machine or not, but what they
definitely did do was start sending emails to all the people on the list
who had sending of emails disabled (including myself) which resulted in a
flood of emails and from the sound of it a lot of annoyed people. If he
wanted to community support for the takeover that probably wasn't a good
start.

In case it isn't obvious why I might be subscribed but emails turned off, I
read mailing lists like that through gmane in which case I still need to
sign up to the list to post but definitely don't want to receive emails.

--
Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com

[alex23]

On May 4, 11:43 pm, Duncan Booth <duncan.bo...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> In case it isn't obvious why I might be subscribed but emails turned off, I
> read mailing lists like that through gmane in which case I still need to
> sign up to the list to post but definitely don't want to receive emails.

This. I was surprised to suddenly start receiving emails, as I thought
I'd left the pyjamas list _years_ ago.

I've asked them to stop spamming me and even now and getting snide,
shitty emails claiming that what they were doing wasn't spam as I
"could have chosen to ignore it or delete it". I've had to email the
abuse address at Rackspace. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to add people
to a mailing list without their consent, to not include instructions
on how to unsubscribe from the mailing list, and to continue to email
them when they've asked to be removed.

As for the project itself, having a bunch of arrogant assholes decide
that the lead developer has "hijacked" the project with his explicit-
from-the-start libre software "philosophies", because such belief runs
counter to the desires - sorry, the "philosophies" - held by that core
group of assholes, is just the must astounding hypocrisy I've ever
seen. The correct approach in such an instance is to *fork* the
project; but that way you don't get to steal the community, I guess.

The unwanted email was bad enough. The overwhelming sense of
entitlement those emails expressed was even worse.