[OTR-dev] mpOTR redux - now in git

[Arlo Breault]

https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/commits/legacy/spec/mpOTR.txt  




On Thursday, 14 February, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Meredith L. Patterson
> <clonearmy at gmail.com (mailto: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.
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>  
>  


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