[OTR-dev] mpOTR redux - now in git

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Meredith L. Patterson
<clonearmy at gmail.com> wrote:
>  would prefer to see it dealt
> with right here where you brought it up by failing to properly credit
> Nadim's work.

When Nadim posted, I responded off-list because I believe this drama
has no place for otr-dev.

I responded to him with my email records showing that the document
existing in April 2013— long prior to the history reflected on the
wikipage (which appears to indicate that Nadim is the sole author of
the text), and the commentary from my email records indicated that at
the time I believed Jake to be a joint author of the document.  The
MP-OTR spec (being discussed, not the document you linked to) provides
no attribution to anyone except Nadim, although I was certain that
this wasn't the case.

In response Nadim confirmed my understanding.  Apparently the true
history of the document was lost when it was moved from git into the
cryptocat wiki at some point, similarly to how Jake's fork doesn't
include the history from the current cryptocat wiki (which includes a
relatively modest amount of changes on the original document).  Nadim
further went on to claim "[Jake's] contributions to this document were
done with him being part of the Cryptocat team at the WSJ hack-a-thon
and thus this document belongs to the Cryptocat Project.".  This
theory of ownership may explain Nadim's failure to acknoweldge Jake's
authorship— but it is not a sound theory, legally or ethically as I'm
sure you would agree.

My own view is:
* This is foolish drama which has no place on this list
* The reputation attacks are unjustified and unfortunate.
* This is foolish drama which has no place on this list
* By failing to at all acknowledge Jake's joint authorship of the
document in his public accusation of plagiarism Nadim misrepresented
the situation.
* This is foolish drama which has no place on this list
* Now that everyone is convinced everyone else is acting in bad faith
the simple polite off-list resolution of this drama which should have
been used is now not working.
* This is foolish drama which has no place on this list
* This is all over a rather insignificant incomplete protocol
specification for a protocol that was really designed by none of the
people involved in this discussion.  Who is the author of those couple
hundred lines of prose is not very important... what is important is
that someone get around to finishing it and implementing it.
* This is foolish drama which has no place on this list

In spite of this being foolish drama which has no place on this list,
I now feel ethically obligated to comment in order to speak out in
defense of Jake and to point out the factual inaccuracies which appear
to have inspired your comments.   As a penance for my contribution to
this mess by responding in public I will be donating to one of the tor
server hosting projects.

I beg everyone to just add a bunch of attributions to all the copies
of the document (which would be easier if the original history weren't
apparently lost) and move on with life.