On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Hi Bryan, > > I understand where you're coming from, but I'd appreciate it if we > could keep the discussion on a less visceral level? Nobody's personal > integrity is being impugned, but it's the nature of this kind of > governance discussion that we have to consider unlikely-and-unpleasant > hypotheticals. It's like when you talk to a lawyer about a contract or > a will or whatever: they'll make you think about all kinds of horrible > possibilities, not because any of them are likely, but because sooner > or later *something* will go wrong, and the point of having a > contract/will/governance document is to provide some framework to > handle whichever unlikely edge case does arise. > > And the other purpose of this kind of framework is to avoid the > *perception* (whether justified or not) of these kinds of conflicts of > interest -- if not handled well then this can easily scare away > volunteers, contributions from other companies, etc. Obviously you > know Travis and Continuum well as an employee there, but to most > people without that personal connection, Continuum is just a large > corporate entity with unknown motives. Imagine if instead of Continuum > we were talking about it was Google or RandomAggressiveStartup -- some > company that you didn't have any personal connection or insight into. > For someone in this position, it's not unreasonable to want more of a > reassurance that things will work out then just being asked to trust > that the CEO is personally committed to not being evil and they can > trust him. > Anybody who comes to NumPy should know that I wrote it and then gave it to the community -- creating an independent foundation at the same time as I created a Company to create a division between them so that my actions could be understood. I really don't know how to give more reassurance. I'm actually offended that so many at BIDS seem eager to crucify my intentions when I've done nothing but give away my time, my energy, my resources, and my sleep to NumPy for many, many years. I guess if your intent is to drive me away, then you are succeeding. > > Also, in these messages you seem to be working from a framework where > people working in good faith will always agree, and so any suggestion > of a possible conflict of interest can only arise through bad faith. > But this isn't true. Is it really so difficult to imagine that, say, > Continuum and Enthought might at some point have conflicting needs for > numpy, or for Continuum's vision of the future of numpy could be > less-than-perfectly-representative with every bit of numpy's entire > giant userbase? Of course not, but this is no different than anyone else and a company should not be singled out. All you are doing is forcing any contribution to be either only from a non-profit or have individuals hide their actual allegiances. > Continuum is a company that has in the past submitted > rather obscure patches to numpy that AFAICT are used exclusively by a > particular contracting customer (e.g. [1]), and that is currently > investing a substantial multiple of numpy's development budget on > building a direct competitor to numpy. > Good grief! These comments are so much bunk that I have to call you on it emphatically. You claim below that you are unconcerned but yet you insinuate some crazy, ulterior motivations for Continuum actually helping people upgrade their NumPy installation that broke their old code because of changes to NumPy. This kind of comment really upsets me. You dismiss real things and real problems that happen and brush it away because it's *commercial*. That patch you reference was actually an attempt to fix a problem that the community pushed on the world --- therefore breaking people's code (but good thing the ABI didn't change...). We were up front about it and worked with the community to get a change into NumPy to accommodate a user of the tool. It was hard work to figure out how to do that. To have you use that as some kind of argument against Continuum is not only unfair, it is exactly the kind of mis-characterization and mis-interpretation of events that I refer to in other posts. And to say that we are investing a substantial multiple of Numpy's development budget in a competitor is also incorrect. Continuum invests in competent people who want to do interesting things. We don't have a rule that says things are "off-limits" including NumPy. If competent people feel like an alternative to NumPy is a good idea, then a certain amount of exploration in that direction is allowed. DyND does not have to be a competitor to NumPy. It might compete with *your* vision of NumPy, but it doesn't have to compete with NumPy. > > To emphasize: I personally am not concerned by these facts -- we did > merge that patch I linked, and there's no animosity between the numpy > and dynd teams -- but reasonable people could reasonably be concerned > that tricky situations might emerge in the future, and I've talked to > plenty of people who are nervous about Continuum's influence in > general. Who are these people? How about they come forward and express what it is they are actually nervous about. Really? nervous? What kind of "tricky" situations are we talking about. Can't you see that this sounds as odd to me as me telling you that I'm concerned about BIDS influence? What about Dato, Databricks, Enthought, or Cloudera influence? What does this even mean? Is this just Matthew and Stefan or are there others as well with these feelings? These are the only actual people who have expressed in public what might be considered concern that I am aware of. I think this kind of anti-commercial commentary has no place in a community that also includes people that work at companies. I can't see how we can agree to *any* governance document with this kind of FUD being spread around. > And with my numpy developer hat on, I don't even care which > "side" is right, that's irrelevant to me, because my concern is with > providing a space where both "sides" feel comfortable working > together. This is why it's crucial that numpy-the-project be clearly > distinguishable as an independent entity that is beholden only to its > own community: it's *exactly because* we *value* the contribution of > companies like Continuum, and want to be able to freely foster those > relationships without creating suspicion and bad blood. > Of course we agree on this. I have no idea why anyone thinks we don't? That's the one thing we *do* agree on. That NumPy is an independent project which can be influenced by anyone in the community and should be developed based on technical discussions and not fear of hob-goblins and people that also work at companies that may benefit from the work that goes on here (there is a large list in this camp). I am deeply saddened by the insinuation and the implication of what these threads are telling me about how little my efforts have been valued by people I care about. > Also to emphasize: none of this means that Travis can't be on the > steering council -- I think that's a more complex issue that I'll > address separately. All I'm saying is that pretending that you aren't > going to reassure people by pretending this elephant isn't in the > room, or by taking a reasonable set of concerns and aggressively > turning them into a referendum on individual people's integrity. > We should call out the elephant in the room. But, I think we should understand who and what the elephant is. Perhaps there are too many off-list and back-channel conversations happening at BIDS and elsewhere that are serving to bias people against facts. Facts that otherwise would show that I and Continuum have always just been trying to ensure the success of NumPy as an independent project that is fully supported, backward compatible, maintained, available to the world in easy to install ways, and documented. > Finally, can I point out... anyone who has some wariness around the > possible influence of financial interests on the community (whether > justified or not!) is in particular not going to be reassured if you > keep aggressively attempting to shut down any perceived criticism of > *your own employer*. I know that your paycheck is not dictating your > opinions, and probably the hypothetical people I'm talking about are > being totally unfair to you for even considering such a thing, but... > strictly as a matter of practical rhetoric, I don't think this is the > most effective way to accomplish your goals. > > I agree with this. I certainly did not encourage Bryan. He was acting out of his own sense of injustice. But, I would add, that your insinuation and mis-characterization of my activities at Continuum and potentially elsewhere are unfair and incorrect and also not effective at getting governance documents approved and ratified. I will get over feeling offended and work to get over my frustration at academics for thrusting this anti-company and potentially anti-Travis rhetoric on the community. But, if you indeed have such hard feelings, then please air all of them so we can hopefully just get past this. > -n > > [1] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/359 > > > On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 11:28 PM, Bryan Van de Ven <bry...@continuum.io> > wrote: > > > >> I don't know how productive it is to dream up examples, but it's not > > > > Well, agreed, to be honest. > > > >> very hard to do. Currently, e.g., the community is not ready to adopt > >> numba as part of the ufunc core. But it's been stated by some that, > > > > Who are you speaking for? The entire community? Under what mandate? > > > >> with so many people running Conda, breaking the ABI is of little > >> consequence. And then it wouldn't be much of a leap to think that numba > >> is an acceptable dependency. > > > > The current somewhat concrete proposal I am aware of involves funding > cleaning up dtypes. Is there another concrete, credible proposal to make > Numba a dependency of NumPy that you can refer to? If not, why are we mired > in hypotheticals? > > > >> There's a broad range of Continuum projects that intersect with what > >> NumPy does: numba, DyND, dask and Odo to name a few. Integrating them > >> into NumPy may make a lot more sense for someone from Continuum than for > >> other members of the community. > > > > May? Can you elaborate? More speculation. My own position is that these > projects want to integrate with NumPy, not the converse. Regardless of my > opinion, can you actually make any specific arguements, one way or the > otehr? What if if some integrations actually make more sense for the > community? Is this simply a dogmatic ideological position that anything > whatsoever that benefits both NumPy and Continuum simultaneously is bad, on > principle? That's fine, as such, but let's make that position explicit if > that's all it is. > > > > Bryan > > _______________________________________________ > > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > > https://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion > > > > -- > Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > https://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion > -- *Travis Oliphant* *Co-founder and CEO* @teoliphant 512-222-5440 http://www.continuum.io
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