Re: Scummvm-devel Digest, Vol 28, Issue 7

I think csnover had a point when he mentioned that we should have a code-of-conduct that’s easily discoverable for anyone.

Could we just for the time being simply copy/paste an acceptable code-of-conduct from another project, maybe Ubuntu, and post it somewhere on the ScummVM webpage or GitHub where it is easily discoverable?

ScummVM is a prestigious project that’s highly visible in the news etc. it would be a good example going forward to have a written code-of-conduct.

This is just my opinion, what does everybody else think?

Cheers,
rsn8887

> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 18. Oktober 2018 um 01:47 Uhr
> Von: [email protected]
> An: [email protected]
> Betreff: Scummvm-devel Digest, Vol 28, Issue 7
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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Why I left ScummVM (Filippos Karapetis)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2018 02:46:43 +0300
> From: Filippos Karapetis <[email protected]>
> To: Colin Snover <[email protected]>,  ScummVM List
> 	<[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Scummvm-devel] Why I left ScummVM
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAF39qagiLGAv8Bg8ouexaJrw+OrzjUKiSP37dZH-hvr=PBCcfQ@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Colin,
> 
> I'm sorry that you left the project for your own reasons, but I feel that
> your e-mail touches a lot of issues that should not go unanswered, not only
> for the project itself, but for the way you depict sev, and the way you
> treated other members of this project.
> 
> I admire sev for not replying to a mail that turned out to be a personal
> attack against him, however I find it very unfair to try and present your
> own issues and your bad treatment towards others as an unfair treatment
> towards you. I will speak for myself, since my experience from working with
> you has turned out to be a personal nightmare. My intention is not to
> attack you, but to show you that your behavior affects others negatively.
> Your original intentions may have been good, but the way things escalated
> turned out to be quite ugly. Thus, I find it odd that you are complaining
> that you have been abused, when you have clearly abused others yourself.
> 
> You are a very passionate developer, and are paying great attention to
> detail. However, although you have a lot of patience when you wish to debug
> a piece of code, or when you want to add a new feature, this patience is
> completely non-existent when you deal with people. You are hardheaded and
> stubborn, and while you were working on this project, there have been many
> situations where you wanted to enforce your personal views and way of work
> on others. This is a clear sign of disrespect.
> 
> >From my personal dealings with you, I can state the following:
> - Initially, I was one of your main backers, and suggested that you should
> be accepted to the project, after you showed remarkable work on the SCI
> engine
> - However, right after you joined, you started questioning the way we
> worked on the project. You found that work on the SCI engine should be
> changed, and that everyone working on it should do so via pull requests.
> The sole reason for this was that you wanted the development on SCI to
> progress your way. Most of the commits made during the period you worked on
> the SCI engine were done by you only, for this reason.
> - There were a lot of e-mails where this was discussed. The end result was
> that you wanted everyone else to work in this manner, and it was respected,
> initially.
> - Unfortunately, your nerves and lack of patience got the better of you. I
> was personally attacked and abused by you for any work I dared to present
> and you didn't like. I stopped working on the SCI engine so that things
> would cool down, since each and every change was scrutinized and turned
> into either a heated discussion, or a personal attack, or received
> sarcastic comments.
> - I was permanently blocked by you, on github, e-mails and IRC. The excuse
> was that you wanted "a peace of mind". This is the worst treatment I have
> ever had online from any individual. If you thought that your personal
> growth was hindered, imagine how I felt when I had no way of communicating
> with you to clear things up. This was a one-sided block - I never block
> people when I disagree with them.
> - Then, you wanted to change the way all the project worked. It's great
> that you wanted to take ownership of the release process, however you did
> so without discussing or collaborating, again by enforcing your way of
> thinking (what you call "picking up the slack"). As you found out, the way
> you forced your way of thinking led to insecurity and confusion.
> 
> I will return to your comments about sev: IMHO, he is neither dismissive
> nor non-constructive. Your way of thinking was to clobber a slew of
> unrelated commits in a huge pull request, which had to be split into more
> meaningful chunks, as it touched all sorts of unrelated parts of the
> project. It was sev that urged other developers to respect your work and
> merge it piece by piece in separate pull requests after you left. As for
> supernova, I can't find any "yelling" by sev at you. The only thing I
> remember, and can find public messages, was a discussion on how that engine
> should be merged, because of issues with the git merge.
> 
> Thus, from my personal experience with you, I will agree with sev's
> opinion: your own behavior has been troublesome and vindictive, and you
> have demonstrated to be a non-good team player. I believe that nobody
> should suffer from negative treatment such as the one I suffered from you,
> and I find it very nasty that you're trying to blame others for your own
> unprofessional and aggressive behavior. You need to reflect on your
> mistakes, be more patient, and try to work problems out with others
> constructively, instead of enforcing your opinion and causing heated
> arguments.
> 
> To sum up, your work on several parts of the project has been wonderful,
> and it was sad to see you go. It's great that you are offering your WIP
> code to anyone interested, as it's a great way to keep OSS projects such as
> ScummVM alive and kicking :) I wish you the best, I feel sorry for the way
> this whole situation escalated and ended. I really hope all the best in
> your personal and professional life, and I hope that I'm no longer in your
> block list, so you can read this e-mail.
> 
> Warm regards
> Filippos
> 
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 11:22 PM Colin Snover <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> 
> > Team,
> >
> > I’d intended to write this email when I left but I was not able to do so
> > at the time because of how emotionally difficult the situation was for
> > me. I apologise for my abrupt disappearance; this was unfair to all of
> > you, and it is not how I want to handle myself.
> >
> > To explain why I left, I must speak honestly and directly about some
> > ugly experiences with sev. I know that some of this can come across as
> > an attack, but it is not intended as such. My goals are to offer
> > closure, and to stop a cycle of abuse so that others don’t experience
> > what I did. I’ve tried to do my best to say only as much as I need to to
> > feel like I am meeting these goals, since I genuinely don’t want to make
> > anybody feel bad. It would also do me no good to burn bridges by being
> > vindictive, since I’d enjoy working with you all again sometime.
> >
> > When I started working on ScummVM, I received support and encouragement
> > from sev which was critical to my personal growth, and for the success
> > of SCI32. Until late 2017, I was excited by the idea of working more
> > directly with him on Director engine, since up to that point I’d had a
> > generally positive experience, and I did not understand past
> > contributors’ emails like this[1].
> >
> > [1]
> > http://lists.scummvm.org/pipermail/scummvm-devel/2015-December/011602.html
> >
> > During 2017, sev seemed to be less and less involved with ScummVM & more
> > negative when he was. When I would reach out, I would increasingly often
> > not get a response. Whenever I asked how things were, the answer was
> > always “busy”. Eventually, our communication devolved to be mostly
> > comments directed at me whenever one of my commits broke a Buildbot build.
> >
> > Since sev seemed overworked and disengaged, and I didn’t want to burden
> > him any more, I started trying to pick up the slack as much as I could.
> > This is how I ended up managing the ScummVM 2.0 release with criezy.
> > This has been standard practice on other OSS teams I’ve worked on, so I
> > didn’t see myself as doing anything unusual. However, it was clearly a
> > mistake on my part to assume this was a correct action. While I did talk
> > about what I was doing when I was doing it, I should have been more
> > explicit in declaring my intent and rationale, and I take complete
> > responsibility for how this created insecurity and confusion which
> > contributed to these incidents.
> >
> > My first major incident with sev happened during 2.0 release
> > preparation. There was a difficult crasher bug[2] where the only
> > reproduction was UB that would cause UBSan to crash. sev copied code
> > from the OP and committed it without reproduction and without comment.
> > Between the time of comment 17 and comment 18, there was a fairly
> > hostile PM exchange where I was told I was being contradictory and that
> > the UB didn’t matter and any well-defined code would be worse. When I
> > tried to clarify what I was saying, because it felt like I was not being
> > heard, I was told I was just repeating myself. Eventually, I constructed
> > an agreement which I summarised in comment 18. Per that agreement, I
> > opened a ticket and then a PR[3], where sev wrote more dismissive and
> > nonconstructive feedback.
> >
> > [2] https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/10116
> > [3] https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/1077
> >
> > My second major incident with sev happened a little while later, around
> > February. sev sent me a PM which quickly escalated into full-scale
> > personal attacks and passive-aggressive sarcastic comments about me. I
> > was yelled at for congratulating Joefish for merging Supernova[4], and
> > for asking opinions of team members other than him on some preliminary
> > ideas I had. I was accused of being a bad actor who was planning a coup,
> > and that I was intentionally trying to split the team. He said I was
> > “anonymous”, and hiding behind this anonymity to do these bad things. He
> > threatened to delete things from the servers since I couldn’t be trusted
> > with any privileged information.
> >
> > [4]
> > http://lists.scummvm.org/pipermail/scummvm-devel/2018-January/012065.html
> >
> > While the overwhelming majority of the interactions I’ve had on this
> > project have been wonderful and professional, I have also experienced a
> > culture of silence which enables this sort of bad behaviour. I have been
> > complicit in this as well, ignoring and minimising things which didn’t
> > feel right because I was afraid of causing trouble or coming across as
> > overly negative. These two incidents were the final catalysts for my
> > departure, but they were just the end of a line of troublesome behaviour
> > which I don’t expect to see from anyone I work with, let alone from a
> > project lead.
> >
> > Most other OSS projects today[5][6][7][8] have a code of conduct.
> > ScummVM does not. As a result, anyone who experiences abuse like this
> > must suffer or leave because they don’t have any other recourse. There
> > are no direct consequences for anyone who acts this way. At least one
> > other major past contributor I’ve talked to received similar threats
> > from sev, and this behaviour was a major factor in their leaving the
> > project as well. These departures are preventable, and they are a
> > tragedy for everybody who works on or uses ScummVM.
> >
> > [5] https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-conduct
> > [6] http://citizencodeofconduct.org/
> > [7] https://www.ubuntu.com/community/code-of-conduct
> > [8] https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/
> >
> > I feel like I’ve made some mistakes of my own when interacting with team
> > members from time to time, and wish that a code of conduct had existed
> > so that there would have been a better conduit for resolution for anyone
> > who felt like I was not being respectful and who felt that they could
> > not communicate this directly to me. I apologise to anyone who may have
> > experienced any gruff or inappropriate behaviour from me. I would like
> > to do better and I hope I will have the opportunity to do so in the future.
> >
> > I don’t think that sev—or anyone else who’s volunteered their time to
> > work on ScummVM—acts with malice. I genuinely don’t hate sev, and I
> > would like things for him to go well, just as I hope the same for all of
> > you. I don’t like not being part of the solution, but for my own
> > wellness, I just can’t continue to work on a project where there isn’t
> > an open, respectful, and professional environment.
> >
> > Here is a recap of all of the work in progress which I was not able to
> > complete, as of the last time I looked at ScummVM:
> >
> > * The new Buildbot and Ansible playbooks for deployment were finished
> > and ready to go. These were in my scummvm-buildbot and
> > scummvm-infrastructure repositories.
> > * Reverse engineering of the SCI MIDI engine was ~85% finished (only bug
> > fixing remains), the GM and MT-32 drivers 100% finished, and ~80% of the
> > AdLib driver finished (only bug fixing remains). This is on my working
> > branch.
> > * Reverse engineering of Shivers 2 system code (the main executable and
> > S2SYS.dll) was ~85% finished, and room code (the numbered DLLs) was ~30%
> > finished. This is on my shivers2 branch.
> >
> > Please feel free to reach out with any questions or requests about this
> > work, or if you need to talk. I can’t make any promises on quick
> > responses since this situation is still very difficult for me, but I
> > will do my best to be available. I also have databases and documentation
> > for most of this work if anyone is interested. I won’t see any replies
> > on the mailing list, so please make sure to CC or email responses to me
> > directly. I am still also on Freenode if you prefer to send a PM instead
> > (just make sure you’re registered with NickServ, since due to the spam
> > I’ve had to block PMs from unregistered users).
> >
> > Thank you for reading. Sorry about always writing long emails. At least
> > this is the last one you’ll get from me for a while! :-) I hope that you
> > all continue to be successful in your personal and professional lives
> > and that something good will come out of all of this in the end.
> >
> > Warmest regards,
> >
> > --
> > Colin Snover
> > https://zetafleet.com
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Scummvm-devel mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://lists.scummvm.org/listinfo/scummvm-devel
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> "Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes" - Oscar Wilde
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