pyjamas / pyjs

[james hedley]

On Thursday, 3 May 2012 12:52:36 UTC+1, alex23  wrote:
> Anyone else following the apparent hijack of the pyjs project from its
> lead developer?

Yes, me. The guy now in control got the owner of the domain name to turn it over to him, which is probably ok legally, but he had no public mandate or support. As far as I can see from the mailing list, only 3 or 4 out of the 650 subscribers actively support his actions. He's a long time contributor and genuinely seems quite talented. However there's no getting away from the fact that he's done this undemocratically, when he could have forked the project. To my mind he hasn't made a good enough reasoned justification of his arguments and he's coming across as being very defensive at the moment.

The former leader, Luke Leighton, seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth but I mailed him yesterday and he's on holiday so trying not to pay too much attention to it at the moment.

There's also an allegation, which I am not making myself at this point - only describing its nature, that a person may have lifted data from the original mail server without authorisation and used it to recreate the mailing list on a different machine. *If* that were to be true, then the law has been broken in at least one country.

I'm arguing that there should be a public consultation over who gets to run this project and I'm also thinking of making a suggestion to the python software foundation or maybe other bodies such as the FSF (I'm not a FOSS expert but they were suggested by others) that they host a fork of this project so that we can have a legitimate and stable route forward.

The problem for me with all this is that I use pyjamas in a commercial capacity and (sorry if this sounds vague but I have to be a bit careful) there are probably going to be issues with our clients - corporate people distrust FOSS at the best of times and this kind of thing will make them run for the bloody hills.

In fact, there appear to be a lot of "sleeper" users who make a living out of this stuff and the actions of the new de-facto leader has jeopardised this, pretty needlessly in our opinion.

James