Time for a break...

[Gary Kramlich]

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Note, this email, and I apologize now for it's lack of brevity, is the
result of a discussion that took place in devel at conference.pidgin.im
tonight, so if you were not present, the majority of this will not
affect you nor make much sense to you.  For those of you that were
there, here's the real story, and why I did what I did.  Also, there is
harsh language in this email, if you are sensitive to such language, I
apologize, and advise you not to continue reading.

For all of your schooling and "intelligence", you all failed to read
between the lines and see the real reason I was being offended.  You
made a generalized statement about an entire class of users,
discriminating my family as well, by saying that all Windows users are
useless.  You'll note that I used the word discriminating (to make a
distinction in favor of or against a person or thing on the basis of the
group, class, or category to which the person or thing belongs rather
than according to actual merit) on numerous occasions and ignored it's
usage.  And for the record, here's my argument for Windows--my family
knows how to do the simple stuff they do in it; that means they do *NOT*
have to bother me, which saves time that I already do not have.

Getting back to other arguments.  Ethan, check your memory--I did not
part during the gobject discussion; if you want, I can post the log.  I
made a comment and you took an hour and a half to respond to it.  Aside
from that, I got hot-headed because you work and think like a
head-up-your-ass upper management type, never looking at the transition
time, wanting only the holy grail.  The core/ui split added complexity;
to keep the core/ui split we need to remain complex.  Trying to simplify
something before its scope has even been properly defined is asinine.
You're a naysayer; you get us all tied up in these stupid, pointless
arguments causing us to lose precious hours of work for no reason other
than your ideology on topics that most of us honestly don't give a fuck
about.  And in the case of GObjectification, a topic you know little about.

I still find it funny how you are *ALWAYS* going on about the lack of
time you have, but you spend quite a bit of time on IRC _discussing_
topics that, as I stated above, do nothing but hinder other developers.
 Your discussions *ARE* the source of many interpersonal relation
problems in this project, and you harbor people's views, opinions, and
even code as fire to use against them even long after they've stepped
back.  I'm of course referring to Christian here.  You talk big shit
behind his back and do absolutely nothing to correct the issue. If *YOU*
spent half the time you spend not *IGNORING* all the people you call
idiots, morons, and just plain ignorant, you'd have the time to fix
these problems.  Instead you keep them around for something to bitch
about.  Hell, for as long as I can remember, you've been talking about
how sub-par your own code in the IRC prpl is.  Honestly, what the fuck?!
 Either fix it, or let it the fuck go.

As Peter mentioned, I have been tossing around the idea of quitting.  If
it wasn't apparent from my lack involvement lately.  Although that is
affected by a lot of other things as well.  It seems, to me at least,
every time I try to do something it becomes this big controversial
subject or ends up getting rushed by someone else because I haven't
gotten the time to fix it yet.  Controversial being GObjectification and
the *IDEA* I was working on for pulling out plugin language bindings for
generic language bindings (ie install the PERL, TCL, and Mono libraries
to their proper system location so that applications written in those
languages can leverage libpurple as well).  If you haven't heard of the
latter, that'd be thanks to Ethan over there killing that idea before I
even got anywhere on it for some reason I don't recall (this was a few
months ago now).  As far as rushed, that would have been the tree
restructure, which was actually great because I didn't get blamed for
anything that went wrong, but annoying nonetheless since I saw a bunch
of my work get absolutely butchered.  But high above all these reasons,
pidgin has become more and more of a chore.  When I first started
hacking on it, it was out of enjoyment, and even relaxation if that
makes sense, but now it's tedious and aggravating.  Getting second
guessed constantly before you've even gotten to a decent "draft" of an
idea is cumbersome at best.  Or how about drafting a plan 2 years ago,
everyone refuses feedback, so you start implementing because no one else
claims to know how to do it and you get attacked with "this is over
complicated" and "Why did you use this tool to show an object
hierarchy?"  The former is too little too late, and the later is
erroneous.  It's the tool I used, move on.  (Note the gobjectification
discussion took place in devel at c.p.i between 8:27PM CST and 11:36PM CST
on Tuesday May 8th, 2007; 3 hours of discussion that amounted in nothing
but aggravation)

But more important than all of this, I do not see the short tempers as
being the result of users, but as the end result of the secrecy and lack
of ability to govern ourself.  We may be done with the AOL lawsuit, but
we are far from done when it comes to being affected by it.  Remember
all that conflict of interest stuff Peter was talking about on Thursday;
 Well, besides having two board members that are employed by commercial
Instant Messaging companies, the majority of the board members are
current developers.  As the board agreed to, it can *NOT* affect the day
to day affairs of purple and friends.  Seeing as most of the board
members are current developers, this line of distinction is going to be
gray at best, until the board is comprised of members that are not
current developers and do not have access to the code.  You can debate
this all you want, but follow the logic, it makes sense, unless of
course you expect everyone to just trust everyone, which is never going
to happen.  In either case, we've exchanged the cabal for a board, the
board's actions are public, but the outsider influence is completely
moderated, even for developers.  Which to me seems like nothing more
than a special little club until the board is not majority populated by
current developers.  This in turn alienates the other developers,
especially when announcement's like board elections are made on the
development list.  Basically, if you want to have your special little
club (which by the way, you all looked like a bunch of kids playing
corporation) then keep it off the day to day channels, which IIRC has
been decided, but nonetheless was a bad move in either case.

And to make sure this doesn't get construed into thinking I want to be
on the board and if I wasn't clear enough already.  I personally find
the idea of the IMF board bad for us as a project.  There was poor
description of it's purpose, too many assumptions were made on what was
really going on (especially in regards to the board meeting), and as I
stated above, will be barraged with claims of conflict of interest
within the board and project itself.

This is goodbye again, maybe temporarily, maybe permanent, maybe just
discussions, maybe project.  Anyway it goes, these issues need to be
addressed, because we are not headed down a path that ends well.

- --
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>
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