On 18 June 2015 at 12:00, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
Dude, calm down. I don't have commit access to Bitcoin Core and Gavin already said long ago he wouldn't just commit something, even though he has the ability to do so.

So why did I say it? Because it's consistent with what I've always said:  you cannot run a codebase like Wikipedia. Maintainers have to take part in debates, and then make a decision, and anyone else who was delegated commit access for robustness or convenience must then respect that decision. It's the only way to keep a project making progress at a reasonable pace.

This is not a radical position. That's how nearly all coding projects work. I have been involved with open source for 15 years and the 'single maintainer who makes decisions' model is normal, even if in some large codebases  subsystems have delegated submaintainers.

This is also how all my own projects are run. Bitcoinj has multiple people with commit access. Regardless, if there were to be some design dispute or whatever, I wouldn't tolerate the others with commit access starting some kind of Wiki-style edit war in the code if they disagreed. Nor would I ever expect to get my own way in other people's projects by threatening to revert the maintainers changes.

Core is in the weird position where there's no decision making ability at all, because anyone who shows up and shouts enough can generate 'controversy', then Wladimir sees there is disagreement and won't touch the issue in question. So it just runs and runs and anyone with commit access can then block any change.

I realise some people think this anti-process leads to better decision making. I disagree. It leads to no decision making, which is not the same thing at all.

Bicoin is not like other projects.  There are large financial stakes involved.  I was at a standards convention once and the head of standards at a large company joked to me:

"We know there are 6 people in the standards world that we can never buy.  So we just buy everyone else".

You have to luck out in a huge way to get a person like that running your project.  Linux has done.  Id say bitcoin has been lucky there too.  But have a look at other projects, have a look at the alts, the *last* thing you want is a dictator in may cases.

Ultimately bitcoin is a ledger based on consensus.  There are 3 branches, the miners, the protocol and the market.  They all play a role in regulating bitcoin and generally on the conservative side (which I think is a good thing).  Whatever your view on the 20MB change, it's not a *conservative* approach, which is the approach that has served bitcoin very well so far. 

So bitcoin is not like other open source projects, and that's probably quite a good thing.
 

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