On 18 June 2015 at 12:00, Mike Hearn <m...@plan99.net> wrote: > Dude, calm down. I don't have commit access to Bitcoin Core and Gavin > already said long ago he wouldn't just commit something, even though he has > the ability to do so. > > So why did I say it? Because it's consistent with what I've always said: > you cannot run a codebase like Wikipedia. Maintainers have to take part in > debates, and then make a decision, and anyone else who was delegated commit > access for robustness or convenience must then respect that decision. It's > the only way to keep a project making progress at a reasonable pace. > > This is not a radical position. That's how nearly all coding projects > work. I have been involved with open source for 15 years and the 'single > maintainer who makes decisions' model is normal, even if in some large > codebases subsystems have delegated submaintainers. > > This is also how all my own projects are run. Bitcoinj has multiple people > with commit access. Regardless, if there were to be some design dispute or > whatever, I wouldn't tolerate the others with commit access starting some > kind of Wiki-style edit war in the code if they disagreed. Nor would I ever > expect to get my own way in other people's projects by threatening to > revert the maintainers changes. > > Core is in the weird position where there's no decision making ability at > all, because anyone who shows up and shouts enough can generate > 'controversy', then Wladimir sees there is disagreement and won't touch the > issue in question. So it just runs and runs and *anyone* with commit > access can then block any change. > > I realise some people think this anti-process leads to better decision > making. I disagree. It leads to no decision making, which is not the same > thing at all. >
Bicoin is not like other projects. There are large financial stakes involved. I was at a standards convention once and the head of standards at a large company joked to me: "We know there are 6 people in the standards world that we can never buy. So we just buy everyone else". You have to luck out in a huge way to get a person like that running your project. Linux has done. Id say bitcoin has been lucky there too. But have a look at other projects, have a look at the alts, the *last* thing you want is a dictator in may cases. Ultimately bitcoin is a ledger based on consensus. There are 3 branches, the miners, the protocol and the market. They all play a role in regulating bitcoin and generally on the conservative side (which I think is a good thing). Whatever your view on the 20MB change, it's not a *conservative* approach, which is the approach that has served bitcoin very well so far. So bitcoin is not like other open source projects, and that's probably quite a good thing. > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Bitcoin-development mailing list > Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development > >
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