On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Meredith L. Patterson <[email protected]> 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. _______________________________________________ OTR-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-dev
