On Saturday, August 20, 2016 12:41:35 PM Steve Dougherty wrote:
> Additionally, I think many of us - myself included - had been
> approaching this as "what do we want xor to do?" I think we should look
> into whether alternative people to xor make sense, and to that end
> Stephen Oliver (mrsteveman) has expressed interest. He's already written
> the new OS X installer and tray application, has been contributing to
> documentation and user support, and I've found him great to work with.
> Thoughts?

Hmm potential for another public mud fight :)
But I reckon you try to have this discussion peacefully, so I'll try to give 
you some open questions which haven't been mentioned yet and some of which can 
be answered with "hard", i.e. provable, facts.

But first of all: I do enjoy working and chatting with Stephen as well, he's a 
nice person! If we had funds for two employees he'd definitely have my vote 
from the "human" side :)  [cannot judge his code, haven't read it yet.]
But given that we can only pay one person for a year, we need to carefully 
evaluate whether potentially throwing away lots of previously paid education 
cost on me is worth it.


Now here are the open questions:

- What can Stephen offer financially?
My offer:
21.62 EUR/hour, at current conversion rate that's
24.48 USD/hour all inclusive, nothing to deduct

That's what I was paid during the last 6 months of employment [4]:
I'm of course 10000% OK with keeping it as is until I actually fix WoT to not 
suck anymore :) And to make things simple, I'd also say that even if I fix it 
with the current funds I don't want a raise until the next batch funding.
There's been too much annoyance caused by me adjusting to you as new
RM/co-boss and I'm willing to keep being paid much below CS-graduate-level for 
a while to punish myself for that :)

- What are Stephens qualifications?
I can offer:
* 5926 commits on Freenet stuff (3540 WoT, 1488 FT, 898 fred. Sources: [1])
* Diffstat on Freenet stuff: 225,443 lines of code added, 127,116 removed,
  resulting in 66,071 lines of code written [2].
* I tailored my CompSci BSc studies specifically to use any choices I could
  make being for things useful for Freenet:
+ Core lecture: Communication networks
+ Core lecture: Server-side web applications
+ Core lecture: Client-side web applications
+ Voluntary core lecture: Online algorithms
+ Journalism as secondary subject (you have to do a non-CompSci secondary
  subject in CompSci, and it's like almost a dozen lectures, heh)
+ Seminar about freedom of speech in different countries
+ Seminar about db4o (that's what we used in fred and still use in WoT/FT)
+ My bachelor's thesis was about WoT [3]

I guess pulling out the grades would be too much bragging here.
But if someone has any doubt in whether my studies even exist: I've asked 
University for a diploma in English and can provide a scan to Ian.

- We haven't finished the vote on what to develop yet.
Are we at the point of deciding which tool to use yet given that we don't even 
know which tasks we want to accomplish with it? If we decide for a hammer now 
then suddenly the poll shows we need a saw.

- I have the general feeling that the work climate of the project has become 
awful. I don't want to put blame on anyone, I've also been involved in 
worsening the climate (and certainly not Stephen - I never had any argument 
with him whatsoever! :). Maybe it's just that lots of the contributors have 
changed, we just need to get used to new coworkers. Maybe nobody is to blame, 
maybe it's just really people having to get to know each others.
But ignoring who's to blame, consider this:
It certainly won't improve the climate if we fire someone as a thanks for 
dedicating their personal savings and goodwill to live 8 months without a new 
job just so they could stay available for hire by Freenet once it has money 
again. Yes, I admit the guilty shameful truth:
The possibility of this happening *does* frustrate me.
Am I evil and egoistic because of that? I don't know.
Well, I still feel like I can look at myself in the mirror because I 
volunteered for 6 years before I got money, and I also blew lots of my 
personal savings during the past 8 months, *and* continued to volunteer during 
that time. So I don't feel like it's about the money.
Still, even if you think I'm greedy, I suppose we can at least agree on one 
thing: Any human who spent more years upon volunteering for a project than 
being paid wouldn't exactly enjoy the prospect of this happening :) It's a 
pretty natural reaction.
So while my feelings about it are my personal bad luck, I still don't know 
whether such a big bang is something which would be good for our general 
feelings as a team: It is something people could relate to and feel bad 
emotions from as well. And the new employee would live under a constant sword 
of damocles.
I think we need a better team climate, not a worse one.
But well, that's just my egoistic feelings as a human :)
Perhaps I should just shut up and continue trying to improve socially, it's an 
endless endeavour having grown up in front of a damn computer...
But well, notably my fears about the future team climate also are caused by a 
positive thing which I want to end this mail with:

I can promise that I will finish fixing WoT and Freetalk even if I am not 
hired again. It will probably take a lot longer, but it must happen:
I am personally very ashamed that I underestimated the complexity of those 
projects so much that it takes this many years to finish them :(
This is a disservice to the community, and I want to fix it, be it with money 
or without!
It's not a job or a hobby, this is a part of me and a duty I feel obliged to 
fulfill as part of my own personal life goals.


Greetings :)


[1]
https://github.com/freenet/plugin-WebOfTrust/graphs/contributors
https://github.com/freenet/plugin-Freetalk/graphs/contributors
https://github.com/freenet/fred/graphs/contributors

[2] The sources are the same as [1], but for the total lines you need to 
substract 32256 lines of the 3rd party library "kaptcha" whose code I 
committed to the WoT repository.

[3] https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-April/038916.html

[4] My rate was fixed at a GBP value but I think for simplicity we should fix 
it at EUR because I live in an EUR country. So I took the average of the 
converted EUR amount I received during the last 6 months of payments: 
sum(payments after EUR conversion) / sum(hours)

--
hopstolive  (keyword for Ians spam filter)

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