On 07.11.2012 09:45, Łukasz Langa wrote:

I'd like to raise a concern that Anatoly's actions are disruptive and largely unhelpful. His passive-agressive writing style is well known but it seems this no longer satisfies him. Today, without consulting anyone he edited our Wiki guidelines and removed the "Do not remove guidelines you do not agree with!" note (yes, really):

http://wiki.python.org/moin/WikiGuidelines?action=diff&rev1=35&rev2=36

Should we react in any way? How do you perceive his contributions in general?

I've reverted his changes. The wiki guidelines are much too important to have them changed significantly without any discussion on pydotorg-www (or wherever such things are discussed :-)).

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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On 7 Nov, 2012, at 9:45, Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:

I'd like to raise a concern that Anatoly's actions are disruptive and largely unhelpful. His passive-agressive writing style is well known but it seems this no longer satisfies him. Today, without consulting anyone he edited our Wiki guidelines and removed the "Do not remove guidelines you do not agree with!" note (yes, really):

http://wiki.python.org/moin/WikiGuidelines?action=diff&rev1=35&rev2=36

Should we react in any way? How do you perceive his contributions in general?

I don't think it is worthwhile to react beyond the revert that Marc Andre did. He appears to mean well, but has trouble communicating clearly. I've noticed that while I still read his e-mails to python-ideas I do give them ever less attention because he appears to just drop of half-baked ideas without any intention of following up on them.

That said, I have received a number of useful contributions from him for other projects.

Ronald

-- Best regards, Łukasz Langa Senior Systems Architecture Engineer

IT Infrastructure Department Grupa Allegro Sp. z o.o.

http://lukasz.langa.pl/ +48 791 080 144

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Wiadomość napisana przez Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> w dniu 7 lis 2012, o godz. 13:06:

Am 07.11.12 09:45, schrieb Łukasz Langa:

...

I'd like to raise a concern that Anatoly's actions are disruptive and largely unhelpful. His passive-agressive writing style is well known but it seems this no longer satisfies him. Today, without consulting anyone he edited our Wiki guidelines and removed the "Do not remove guidelines you do not agree with!" note (yes, really):

http://wiki.python.org/moin/WikiGuidelines?action=diff&rev1=35&rev2=36

Should we react in any way? How do you perceive his contributions in general?

I (am known to) perceive his contributions in the most negative way. For several times, I was close to banning him from certain systems I care about, but rather chose to ignore him instead.

I have been doing the same thing for quite some time, too. Lately though I gave some thought into this and I think maintaining the status quo is harmful to us as a community. I'd like us to react somehow.

I agree with Jacob Kaplan-Moss when he says [1]: "I will call out antisocial behavior, enforce professionalism in the communities where I have the power to do, and leave the communities that cannot at least offer civility."

More generally, Eliezer Yudkowsky's opinion [2] resonates with me: "good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves". While this sounds overly dramatic, it describes the gist of the problem: quality goes down to the point where helpful members stop caring.

What can we do? Apart from the obligatory joke of nudging him gently towards Ruby, I think calling his behavior out is a good idea. Cory Doctorow also thinks that "many trolls are perfectly nice in real life -- sometimes, just calling them on the phone and confronting them with the human being at the other end of their attacks is enough to sober them up" [3]. If that fails, banning him would show that we care about the quality of communication and technical prowess is no excuse for abusive behavior.

All in all, is anyone of the opinion that losing him as a community member is worse than keeping him around?

[1] http://jacobian.org/writing/assholes/ [2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ [3] http://www.informationweek.com/how-to-keep-hostile-jerks-from-taking-ov/1996...

-- Best regards, Łukasz Langa Senior Systems Architecture Engineer

IT Infrastructure Department Grupa Allegro Sp. z o.o.

http://lukasz.langa.pl/ +48 791 080 144

On 07.11.2012 14:26, Łukasz Langa wrote:

What can we do? Apart from the obligatory joke of nudging him gently towards Ruby, I think calling his behavior out is a good idea. Cory Doctorow also thinks that "many trolls are perfectly nice in real life -- sometimes, just calling them on the phone and confronting them with the human being at the other end of their attacks is enough to sober them up" [3]. If that fails, banning him would show that we care about the quality of communication and technical prowess is no excuse for abusive behavior.

Cory's point is a good one and, at least in my experience, often works wonders.

Call him on the phone or invite him to a conference. He's based in Minsk, Belarus, AFAIK.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Nov 07 2012)

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Python Projects, Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ mxODBC.Zope/Plone.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/

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On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:26:15 +0100, <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:

What can we do? Apart from the obligatory joke of nudging him gently towards Ruby, I think calling his behavior out is a good idea. Cory Doctorow also thinks that "many trolls are perfectly nice in real life -- sometimes, just calling them on the phone and confronting them with the human being at the other end of their attacks is enough to sober them up" [3]. If that fails, banning him would show that we care about the quality of communication and technical prowess is no excuse for abusive behavior.

As Brett pointed out, calling him on his behavior seems to meet with pretty much zero success as far as modifying his future behavior goes. The problem with banning him in general is that that has its own consequences (and as Brett pointed out, how exactly do we do that?). Banning him for specific actions (such as editing the Guidelines) seems sensible. We basically booted him off the infrastructure mailing list (I don't remember if it was a formal ban or not) when he was being off-topic and annoying there.

All in all, is anyone of the opinion that losing him as a community member is worse than keeping him around?

If losing him was the only consequence this would be pretty much a no-brainer. However, it is likely the consequences of a general ban would be more widespread than that (negative publicity, etc).

--David

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 12:08 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com> wrote:

On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:26:15 +0100, <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:

...

All in all, is anyone of the opinion that losing him as a community member is worse than keeping him around?

If losing him was the only consequence this would be pretty much a no-brainer. However, it is likely the consequences of a general ban would be more widespread than that (negative publicity, etc).

Right, it isn't banning Anatoly in particular that's likely to be controversial, it's making it completely clear that "yes, if you successfully piss off all the people that hold the keys to the python.org infrastructure, you can and will be banned from participating in any of the communication forums provided by that infrastructure, specifically the mailing lists, the issue tracker and the wiki (and the source code repo, if you previously had commit privileges)".

The mail archives will show that Brett's not the only one that has tried to channel Anatoly's energy more productively (and the creation of python-ideas did keep him from bothering python-dev too much for quite a long time), but every time we think there are signs of progress, some other new issue comes up and the pattern is always basically the same:

• "X sucks"
• "Yes, it's a hard problem, and not very exciting, so volunteers aren't inclined to work on it"
• "but X sucks, so we should do Y"
• "but Y is hugely inconvenient for everyone, so it will never happen. Besides, even if it did happen, it won't help fix X"
• "we should totally do Y, you're all idiots for not seeing that"
• ...

Although substitute alternate explanations at step 2 like "it's a rare problem" or "it's not a problem for the core team to deal with", or "it's not a significant problem for anyone else" or "yes, efforts are in process to deal with that, but its a long slow effort to build community consensus" etc, etc.

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Chris Jerdonek <chris.jerdonek@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 6:08 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com> wrote:

...

On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:26:15 +0100, <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:

...

What can we do? Apart from the obligatory joke of nudging him gently towards Ruby, I think calling his behavior out is a good idea. Cory Doctorow also thinks that "many trolls are perfectly nice in real life -- sometimes, just calling them on the phone and confronting them with the human being at the other end of their attacks is enough to sober them up" [3]. If that fails, banning him would show that we care about the quality of communication and technical prowess is no excuse for abusive behavior.

As Brett pointed out, calling him on his behavior seems to meet with pretty much zero success as far as modifying his future behavior goes.

Aside from calling him out on his behavior and trying to change it, has anyone additionally made it clear to him that "if you continue this behavior, you will be banned from [insert as appropriate]"? Or is an explicit warning not needed?

We could probably give him the explicit warning, and I suspect that may come out of the skype call that was mentioned, but I think he has to know by now that he's been toeing the line for probably 2 years. I used to try to work with him, then switched to trying to talk sense into him, then switched to defending why we do things, and then ended up filtering his emails. I've seen others lead down the same path.

If he's actually reading what we're writing, it's never going in a positive direction with him.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 8:55 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:

[...]

...

All in all, is anyone of the opinion that losing him as a community

member

...

is worse than keeping him around?

No.

It's pretty clear that he's not a net value to Python development. But perhaps his attempts at contributing (no matter how clumsy) have value for him? I imagine it must be pretty lonely being the only geek with deep Python knowledge and interest in Minsk. I realize he's making it hard to be compassionate. But I still think what sets him apart from the typical troll is that he doesn't do it because he likes disagreement. He just lacks social skills (English not being his first language may contribute here). And yes, he doesn't seem to be learning from the feedback he gets.

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

It's pretty clear that he's not a net value to Python development. But perhaps his attempts at contributing (no matter how clumsy) have value for him? I imagine it must be pretty lonely being the only geek with deep Python knowledge and interest in Minsk. I realize he's making it hard to be compassionate. But I still think what sets him apart from the typical troll is that he doesn't do it because he likes disagreement. He just lacks social skills (English not being his first language may contribute here). And yes, he doesn't seem to be learning from the feedback he gets.

Well, is he even interested in learning? He sticks to his preconceived notions about basically everything, including how a community should function.

The only saving grace in his behaviour, IMO, is that he doesn't try to annoy non-core developers.

Regards

Antoine.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

imagine it must be pretty lonely being the only geek with deep Python knowledge and interest in Minsk.

I don't want to distract from your point, but I'm not sure the underlying assumption is warranted here. I happen to have met a few pretty good Python programmers from the Baltic states, one of whom told me about user groups he went to.

Cheers,

Dirkjan

I'm with Dirkjan. Personally I know several pythonistas living in Minsk. Not so many Python Developers as Kiev has, but Minsk is not black hole, trust me.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan@ochtman.nl> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

imagine it must be pretty lonely being the only geek with deep Python knowledge and interest in Minsk.

I don't want to distract from your point, but I'm not sure the underlying assumption is warranted here. I happen to have met a few pretty good Python programmers from the Baltic states, one of whom told me about user groups he went to.

Cheers,

Dirkjan

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I've sent email to Anatoly in Russian describing current situation. CC'ed Eli Bendersky and Łukasz Langa as humans who understand Russian well enough to be witness for my words.

I've call Anatoly to stop disruptive activities and concentrate on productive ones.

I hope I has been benevolent enough as well as strong enough to send him the current state.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan@ochtman.nl> wrote:

...

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

imagine it must be pretty lonely being the only geek with deep Python knowledge and interest in Minsk.

I don't want to distract from your point, but I'm not sure the underlying assumption is warranted here. I happen to have met a few pretty good Python programmers from the Baltic states, one of whom told me about user groups he went to.

Dirkjan, Belarus is not a Baltic state ;-) That said, I agree with Andrew that Anatoly is probably not the only experienced Python programmer in that country.

Eli

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-- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov

Let's wait a bit.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

From his response to me he seems to be unaware that there is a problem...

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I've sent email to Anatoly in Russian describing current situation. CC'ed Eli Bendersky and Łukasz Langa as humans who understand Russian well enough to be witness for my words.

I've call Anatoly to stop disruptive activities and concentrate on productive ones.

I hope I has been benevolent enough as well as strong enough to send him the current state.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben@gmail.com> wrote:

...

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan@ochtman.nl> wrote:

...

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

imagine it must be pretty lonely being the only geek with deep Python knowledge and interest in Minsk.

I don't want to distract from your point, but I'm not sure the underlying assumption is warranted here. I happen to have met a few pretty good Python programmers from the Baltic states, one of whom told me about user groups he went to.

Dirkjan, Belarus is not a Baltic state ;-) That said, I agree with Andrew that Anatoly is probably not the only experienced Python programmer in that country.

Eli

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

-- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov

How do you perceive his contributions in general?

He is really annoying. He is flooding python-ideas and python-dev lists with emails without trying to understand answers. He didn't understand that the Python community is not working for him.

IMO he has a negative effect on the Python community. When he asks a question, he doesn't try to understand how Python is designed and let people think that the Python design just sucks (which is wrong, Python design is great! Python is the best language!).

I'm skipping most Anatoly's messages for all these reasons.

Victor

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 6:21 PM, John Benediktsson <mrjbq7@gmail.com> wrote:

...

IMO he has a negative effect on the Python community. When he asks a question, he doesn't try to understand how Python is designed and let people think that the Python design just sucks (which is wrong, Python design is great! Python is the best language!).

Out of curiousity, I googled Anatoly and python-ideas and this thread[1] seems a useful example. His suggestions seem intended to help, he provided some code examples, and made only a handful of posts in support of his idea (receiving a few negative responses). At times his English was rough, but without going into the merits of his ideas - would an approach where you encourage him to publish his ideas on PyPI or Github give him an outlet for his energy?

He's actually fairly active in Python-related open source as far as I've seen. I've come across his name as a contributor to several projects, so I don't think we need to offer him any outlets.

It seems to me his philosophy clashes with that of python-dev, perhaps his batteries are a different size than those included in Python, but I'd like to see this community be inclusive rather than exclusive, even at the expense of a few added mail filters by the core team.

It would be great to include him or leave him included, but I have the feeling that we're beyond this. I don't buy it that the problem is his English knowledge or that he doesn't know that there was a problem. Sure, he trips up on some English language skills, but those of us who have talked back to him have done so in what are pretty clear negative tones. He has reacted to said negativity with snark, so he gets it.

His philosophy, back when I still read his emails, was that he is correct and to think otherwise is foolish (see his repeated attempts to get us to restructure the entire development process for him). We can ban him, we can keep him - whatever. My email filters will remain.

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 7:10 AM, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov@gmail.com> wrote:

Let's wait a bit.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

From his response to me he seems to be unaware that there is a problem...

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I've sent email to Anatoly in Russian describing current situation. CC'ed Eli Bendersky and Łukasz Langa as humans who understand Russian well enough to be witness for my words.

Did anything come of this? There are now a few more threads on python-ideas that are almost pure Anatoly-instigated noise :P

I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources.

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 7:10 AM, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Let's wait a bit.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

From his response to me he seems to be unaware that there is a problem...

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I've sent email to Anatoly in Russian describing current situation. CC'ed Eli Bendersky and Łukasz Langa as humans who understand Russian well enough to be witness for my words.

Did anything come of this? There are now a few more threads on python-ideas that are almost pure Anatoly-instigated noise :P

I got reply from Anatoly. Short summary is:

1. He don't want to sign Licence Agreement by some reasons (not clean to me. Looks like his objections are not showstopper for every another contributor).
2. He don't want to work on patches due lack of free time/interest and not enough experience level.
3. He like to protect hard his opinion unless 100% sure he is wrong. and
4. He want to be helpful for Python and community

Looks like points 1-3 are opposite to point 4 :)

I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources.

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

-- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov

On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 7:10 AM, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Let's wait a bit.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

...

From his response to me he seems to be unaware that there is a problem...

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I've sent email to Anatoly in Russian describing current situation. CC'ed Eli Bendersky and Łukasz Langa as humans who understand Russian well enough to be witness for my words.

Did anything come of this? There are now a few more threads on python-ideas that are almost pure Anatoly-instigated noise :P

Back in November, I had asked if anyone had ever given him an official/explicit warning that he would be kicked out if he continued certain behavior, and it didn't seem that anyone had ever had. Out of curiosity, has that been done since then? I think it is good practice to issue a warning before kicking someone out.

--Chris

Dnia 25 gru 2012 o godz. 13:37 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> napisał(a):

I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources.

+1

I opened this thread so I feel somewhat responsible to carry this out to finish. Give me a day or two to contemplate on how to achieve the following:

1. Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community.

2. Communicate to Anatoly the decision to cut him off.

3. Arrange for feasible technological ways to execute the ban on python.org resources, preparing also for vengeful action (which given the history is unfortunately likely).

4. Prepare for rectifying unjust PR by the banned person, etc.

I'm seriously considering writing all this as a PEP (most likely without any personal details). I hope this won't be useful in the future but it might help having this gathered as written policy, if only for transparency reasons.

What do you think?

I feel very bad that it has come to this but I strongly believe this is necessary to protect us as a community.

On 12/25/2012 8:01 AM, Christian Heimes wrote:

Am 25.12.2012 13:37, schrieb Nick Coghlan:

...

I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness)

I believe it is cluelessness mixed with an idiosyncratic nacissistic obstinacy that seems to block him from learning. I no longer take anything he says personally.

...

than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources.

I personally see his signal-noise ratio as about 1/2, but can understand if others put it lower (though still above 0/infinity).

The issue Christian mentions below was at most 1/10. On the other hand, another recent issue was close to 1/1 and lead to a doc patch.

He is so far beyond the point of political correctness and respectability that I'm unable to find any words for his behavior in my dictionary. His attitude hasn't improved, too. For example in bug http://bugs.python.org/issue16689 he used an offensive title and re-opened the ticket *twice* although it was closed by two different and highly respectable core devs.

I hate to kick out people but I see no other way to deal with the issue anymore. :(

The third close message said clearly 'Do not reopen again.'. If he ignores that, then I think his tracker access should be suspended for at least a month. (IE, I think that message constituted 'warning'.)

Terry Jan Reedy

This is a continuation of my answer to Christian

On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote:

Dnia 25 gru 2012 o godz. 13:37 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> napisał(a):

...

I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources.

+1

I opened this thread so I feel somewhat responsible to carry this out to finish. Give me a day or two to contemplate on how to achieve the following:

Please do wait. Contemplation and sleep can work wonders.

1. Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community.

I am not sure how broadly you mean 'our community', but please no. Nothing need or should be said beyond this list. (Unless Anatoly says something elsewhere -- but let him be the first.

Spam accounts and messages on the tracker are routinely cancelled without notice. The one time I know of that a contributor was banned (suspended, actually, soon followed by an offer of re-instatement without admin privileges), it was pretty much handled privately (though I would have preferred notice on this list first).

2. Communicate to Anatoly the decision to cut him off.

I think any cut-off should be in stages: tracker, pydev, python-ideas. Anything beyond the tracker should be approved by Guido.

As far as the tracker goes, I think it should be clearly communicated to him and everyone in plain English (and specified in the user guide if not already) that a) the purpose of the tracker is to help committers receive reports, communicate with reporters and others, and to manage issues, and b) after an initial report, the administrative fields are mostly intended for the use of tracker administrators, including committers. The only reason a submitter can edit the status field is so that they can close an issue to withdraw it (possible after review). If we can enforce that in the database (only admins (or possibly only committers) but not the submitter can reopen), I think we should! That would eliminate bogus reopenings by anyone, not just Anatoly.

I say this because he specifically justified his re-open action on the basis that *he* also uses the tracker to track issues. So he does not quite understand what it is for. As I said in my previous post, if he reopens a third time, act. He has not yet that I have seen. I also notice that he just 'voted' to reopen http://bugs.python.org/issue7083 but did not do so himself (possible because he cannot).

Going a bit further, I actually would not let a non-admin submitter edit any field as long as an issue is closed. I see this as a sensible refinement of the database policy based on years of experience and not directly specifically at Anatoly. Another tweak based on experience would be that only committers can set version to security issues. I routinely unset 2.6 and 3.1 with a short explanation. Better that the ignorant cannot even make that mistake (I know, submit to the metatracker.)

3. Arrange for feasible technological ways to execute the ban on python.org resources,

See the suggestion above for the tracker. I presume that the mailing list software can reject specific users and the the gmane is or can be set up to honor rejections. But if that have ever been done, it has been done so privately that I am not aware of it. I would ban from pydev before I would ban from python-ideas. The latter is intended to be a bit more open to off-the-wall posts. I do not see that Anatoly has really abused python-ideas. His post today has 16 responses from other people and only 1 from him. People could have just ignored him after 1 response.

Another technological fix: enforce no cross-posting to peps editors list and anything else by rejecting cross-posted messages, both at the editors list and all other python.org lists. My theme with all these suggestions is that making mis-behavior impossible, when possible, is preferable to scolding and banning. Pushes to the repository by unauthorized people are just rejected. If anyone were to complain publicly about such rejection, they would just be laughed at.

preparing also for vengeful action (which given the history is unfortunately likely).

Shaming anyone publicly is more likely to get such action, and would almost make it justified in my view.

4. Prepare for rectifying unjust PR by the banned person, etc.

Better to not unnecessarily provoke it, and worry about it when it actually happens.

For months, Jim Fauth (sp?) has repeatedly trashed 3.3 on python-list to the point of telling people not to use it, and implicitly slandered us developers, because he hates the new Unicode implementation (it is 'unfair' because some people benefit more than others). I find Jim more annoying than Anatoly because unlike Anatoly, he does not acknowledge contrary facts or answer questions but just repeats the same stupid or irrational generalizations that are based on one fact.

The one fact is that str.find, and hence str.replace, is much slower in 3.3 than 3.2. Because of his report of that fact, there is an issue on the tracker. Jim will not even acknowledge that he did get an issue opened because *that* fact undercuts his narrative about our indifference.

Anyway: thing to do.

1. I find Jim *much* more annoying and destructive than Anatoly. (This is possibly one reason Anatoly, by comparison, does not bother me as much as others).
2. The response on python-list is that one or more regulars (sometimes me, often others) responds to each repetition, more of less politely and rationally, as the spirit moves us. If you are worried about bad PR, driving Anatoly to become like Jim on python-list would be the wrong

I'm seriously considering writing all this as a PEP (most likely without any personal details). I hope this won't be useful in the future but it might help having this gathered as written policy, if only for transparency reasons.

This strike me as over-reaction.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:

This is a continuation of my answer to Christian

On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote:

...

Dnia 25 gru 2012 o godz. 13:37 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> napisał(a):

...

I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources.

+1

I opened this thread so I feel somewhat responsible to carry this out to finish. Give me a day or two to contemplate on how to achieve the following:

Please do wait. Contemplation and sleep can work wonders.

...

1. Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community.

I am not sure how broadly you mean 'our community', but please no. Nothing need or should be said beyond this list. (Unless Anatoly says something elsewhere -- but let him be the first.

At the risk of stating something that I imagine everyone already knows, this list is itself publicly viewable:

http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers

So in some sense what we write here is already being said beyond this list (though not actively). For example, the thread we're engaging in right now is the second result when Googling "python anatoly".

I guess my point is that what's going on is already pretty open to the outside (from a read-only perspective).

--Chris

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

We don't want to be mean to somebody who genuinely appears to be trying to help, but eventually we have to look at his net impact and say "keeping our productive volunteers happy is more important than trying to include someone who has demonstrated over an extended period of time that they lack the ability to collaborate effectively". At the very least, that means revoking tracker and python-dev posting privileges. I'd vote for cutting him off from python-ideas, too.

Something I've realised may not be obvious to everyone - the problem isn't low SNR per se (if you dig up some of my early postings to python-list and python-dev, you'll find a *lot* of noise, so me chastising new posters for low SNR would be the height of hypocrisy), as the fact that Anatoly's SNR hasn't improved over the years, despite core devs (and others) putting plenty of effort into trying to help him learn. The breaking point for me was when he recently declared that he was completely unrepentant about the fact that he repeatedly wastes other people's time by failing to do his research [1]:

"""It's too boring to live in a world of existing knowledge and expertise, and yes, I am not aware of any open collaboration stuff expertise. Any reading recommendations with concentrated knowledge that can fit my brain?"""

FFS, it's the internet. Search engines exist. I, for one, am done spoon feeding him answers that are off topic for the core Python lists, and that he should be able to answer on his own (although I'll still reply to other people that reply to him).

If we start with a suspension rather than a ban, that would also be fine by me. As others have noted, we've given *one* tracker suspension that I'm aware of and it seemed to work wonders.

Regards, Nick.

[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-June/015304.html

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 7:28 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com> wrote:

Anatoly has been shaming us publicly for years. We would be much more polite and rational in any more-public statement made (I trust). We would still draw fire. That may or may not make us stronger in the long run...for it to do so we will, in fact, need to have a principled position to rest upon, and thus I think we would be well recommended to have something PEP-like in terms of a policy statement.

I wonder if a public discussion aimed at developing such a policy would clue Anatoly in (probably not). I wonder what other communities have done. I know Python is one of the leaders in the COC matter, so perhaps we will have to be a leader here as well.

This is not easy stuff.

Any such CoC or policy should probably apply to all python.org mailing lists, and bolting one after things like -dev/ideas/list have been around for so long is going to be a hard task to get right. I do think something along the lines of a CoC is a good thing here, but I think it's much larger than python-dev and probably shouldn't be implemented as the result of or as a reaction to one person. I think it'd probably be a PSF-level thing to apply to python.org properties (a few discussions have kicked off, but nothing's more than an inch off the ground).

I also think the process of creating a CoC that we don't immediately get burned at the stake for could take a long time to create and implement. I don't think we should have to put up with Anatoly while that process gets kicked around.

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

That said, ISTM that the main problem is that the way he communicates is not really effective and that results in an "energy drain" for other people. This can be addressed on both the sides. The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings.

I've filtered his emails to the trash for almost two years now, but I'm not going to ignore that he's now discouraging my friends and colleagues from contribution. I already removed myself from the nosy list on a bunch of issues he created in the past, and the people who were willing to work with him are dropping off. I also will not ignore his tone about a GSoC contribution being useless.

People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. (Note that this apply to everyone, and not to anatoly in particular). Regarding the effectiveness of the communications there's certainty room for improvement, but apparently the previous attempts to address the problem were unsuccessful. I'm willing to make an attempt myself, as I think I have a quite clear idea of the problem.

You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing.

Dnia 26 gru 2012 o godz. 15:09 Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> napisał(a):

The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves.

The problem I see with that suggestion is that in reality we have to work with what we have, not with what we think we should have.

I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply "I don't have time to deal with [people] like him." The other case was sadder though: "Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly."

We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and safe place to contribute.

This is not elitism nor censorship but a simple manner of respecting each other. Think: out of respect for Guido's (or other senior devs') time we should put an end to this. Judging from the YouTube view count, humanity has spent over 3000 years watching Gangnam Style. How much time did humanity spend on this thread and all other non-constructive threads/issues fired by Anatoly?

-- Best regards, Łukasz Langa

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:

Dnia 26 gru 2012 o godz. 15:09 Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> napisał(a):

...

The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves.

The problem I see with that suggestion is that in reality we have to work with what we have, not with what we think we should have.

I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply "I don't have time to deal with [people] like him."

This is somewhat surprising to me. Why would they have to deal with him? If the "people like him" were the core developers I could understand the problem, but he is just one of the many contributors.

The other case was sadder though: "Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly."

I'm not sure I understand this. ISTM that the problem here is with core devs, that are unable to deal with criticism (and have to resort to bans ;) rather than with him.

We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and safe place to contribute.

And a side effect of being welcoming is that you get every kind of people. Different people have different behaviors and skills. I don't think his lack of social skills is worse than e.g. the lack of English skills of some of the contributors. In both cases the intentions are not bad, but the message might be difficult to understand and thus can be misunderstood. These people shouldn't be marginalized just because of their lack of skills. As an example, I recently found out that one contributor on the tracker that sounded somewhat annoying actually was a ~10 years old kid. From that point of view his contributions went from somewhat annoying to quite impressive (and I think some of his patches have been committed too). Of course if people have an intentionally destructive behavior they can be stopped.

This is not elitism nor censorship but a simple manner of respecting each other. Think: out of respect for Guido's (or other senior devs') time

I heard this argument several time, but I'm not sure it's a really strong one. No one is forced to spend his time in any specific way. Granted, as a contributor you end up spending some of your time for this kind of things as well, but that also includes skimming through mails/comments that you don't care about, tell people that they wrote to wrong ML, that the issue they reported is invalid and so on. If people spend time reading his messages and responding to him, I assume they have reasons to do it. If this turns out to be ineffective they should stop.

we should put an end to this. Judging from the YouTube view count, humanity has spent over 3000 years watching Gangnam Style. How much time did humanity spend on this thread and all other non-constructive threads/issues fired by Anatoly?

This is not necessarily non-constructive. We have identified a problem and we are discussing about the possible ways it can be solved, while learning how to deal with similar problem should they occur again in the future.

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

P.S. I haven't seen Gangnam Style yet -- I'm too busy tweaking rst markup in the docs :)

--e.g. Best regards, Łukasz Langa

No, I never got on Skype with Anatoly. I did write a very frank email and got the usual response. I don't think I am up to doing anything more about him. He doesn't bother me that much, I ignore most of his threads. He is a reviewer and committer on Rietveld and behaves better there.

--Guido

On Wednesday, December 26, 2012, Brian Curtin wrote:

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com<javascript:;>> wrote:

...

That said, ISTM that the main problem is that the way he communicates is not really effective and that results in an "energy drain" for other people. This can be addressed on both the sides. The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings.

I've filtered his emails to the trash for almost two years now, but I'm not going to ignore that he's now discouraging my friends and colleagues from contribution. I already removed myself from the nosy list on a bunch of issues he created in the past, and the people who were willing to work with him are dropping off. I also will not ignore his tone about a GSoC contribution being useless.

...

People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. (Note that this apply to everyone, and not to anatoly in particular). Regarding the effectiveness of the communications there's certainty room for improvement, but apparently the previous attempts to address the problem were unsuccessful. I'm willing to make an attempt myself, as I think I have a quite clear idea of the problem.

You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing.

---

python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org <javascript:;> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

Le mercredi 26 décembre 2012 à 08:08 -0800, Eli Bendersky a écrit :

At the risk of stating something that I imagine everyone already knows, this list is itself publicly viewable: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers So in some sense what we write here is already being said beyond this list (though not actively). For example, the thread we're engaging in right now is the second result when Googling "python anatoly". I guess my point is that what's going on is already pretty open to the outside (from a read-only perspective).

Ouch, this is important to keep in mind. Thanks for the reminder, Chris.

This may be a different discussion altogether, but I'm pretty sure that sometimes people write to this list assuming it's private to committers only. Should it be?

I personally think it is very sane for this list to be public.

Regards

Antoine.

Hello,

I agree with Brian and Nick. While I don't bother much with Anatoly anymore (I ignore at least 95% of his postings), I think it is not nice to let newcomers deal with the cognitive overhead of reading and appreciating his ramblings.

That said he doesn't need to be banned from *all* of python.org. Each mailing-list can take individual action. And the justification needn't be verbose. A two-line public message saying "For the record, Anatoly Techtonik has been banned from this mailing-list after the request of numerous contributors" is enough.

Regards

Antoine.

Le mercredi 26 décembre 2012 à 08:18 -0600, Brian Curtin a écrit :

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

...

That said, ISTM that the main problem is that the way he communicates is not really effective and that results in an "energy drain" for other people. This can be addressed on both the sides. The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings.

I've filtered his emails to the trash for almost two years now, but I'm not going to ignore that he's now discouraging my friends and colleagues from contribution. I already removed myself from the nosy list on a bunch of issues he created in the past, and the people who were willing to work with him are dropping off. I also will not ignore his tone about a GSoC contribution being useless.

...

People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. (Note that this apply to everyone, and not to anatoly in particular). Regarding the effectiveness of the communications there's certainty room for improvement, but apparently the previous attempts to address the problem were unsuccessful. I'm willing to make an attempt myself, as I think I have a quite clear idea of the problem.

You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing.

---

python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers

On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:20:06 +0200, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:

...

I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply "I don't have time to deal with [people] like him."

This is somewhat surprising to me. Why would they have to deal with him? If the "people like him" were the core developers I could understand the problem, but he is just one of the many contributors.

Because, to put it in new age-y terms, his bad vibrations are poisoning the environment.

That is perhaps a graphic way to put it, but it is a matter of community tone and nurturing a joyful and creative environment in which all are welcome and feel encouraged to contribute.

Anatoly works against that, almost constantly. Encouraging him to support the community would be *much* better than banning him...but we've tried that.

...

The other case was sadder though: "Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly."

I'm not sure I understand this. ISTM that the problem here is with core devs, that are unable to deal with criticism (and have to resort to bans ;) rather than with him.

By "not understand", I presume you mean the "sadder" comment.

It is not that we are *unable* to deal with criticism. We have dealt reasonably with every criticism he has leveled, I think. But his comments create the *perception* that we are not dealing well with criticism, because he is not but casts the aspersion onto us, while we do that much less frequently to him, but do occasionally lapse into returning tit for tat. Since we are perceived as the ones in the position of power, we get castigated for our actions and reactions much more than Anatoly, the one perceived to be powerless in the situation, ever will be.

Let me repeat that bit, it is important. We are perceived as being the ones in the position of power, and he the powerless. That perception (and the reality behind it) will color every conversation that the wider community has about this issue. That is why I stress that our position and our actions have to come from well articulated principles, otherwise they will be perceived as caprice.

Which, I think, is more or less why you are arguing we should not take action.

However, dealing reasonably with him gets harder and harder over time. It is a failing in me as a person, but every time I see a message from Anatoly, my gut clenches up and I go into a defensive mode, and want to prove him wrong. So I have to master myself and try to speak reasonably, and try to not give back to him what he gives to us. I hope I'm getting better at that, but...

Take issue 16781 as a recent example. I wanted to prove him wrong, both because of his past actions and because of my perception (probably colored by those past actions) of his choice of title for the issue ("execfile/exec messes up...") But there is a real (documentation) issue there. I managed to moderate my tone...almost. I still failed: I said "the fact that the print works should be a clue", implying that he should have seen it himself, But if I were dealing with anyone else, I would have said, "The fact that the print works is a clue..."

This difference is *subtle*. But those subtleties are *important* in determining the tone of a community, the supportiveness of a community, the openness of a community, the inclusiveness of a community. Someone reading my comment on that bug without knowing Anatoly's history would think that the Python community is very stuck up. It is so easy to forget that our words to Anatoly are not read just by him, but by many many other people.

Anatoly spreads negativity almost (but not every!) time he opens his mouth, negativity which is then compounded by our natural human reactions to his tone. Yes it would be great if we could all master ourselves and always speak to him reasonably no matter the provocation, and yes we absolutely should strive very hard for that goal. It should be one of our guiding principles as a community.

But is that enough?

Remember, the issue isn't just *us*, the issue is also the effect on people with whom we never interact directly, people who may flee the community, or not join it, because of the negativity produced by both sides.

Full disclosure: despite arguing here for *doing something* about Anatoly, I am in fact somewhat ambivalent about what. I have no problem with banning him for specific actions (such as a ban from the tracker for repeatedly reopening an issue). But what, if any, other actions should be taken I am not clear on.

...

We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and safe place to contribute.

And a side effect of being welcoming is that you get every kind of people. Different people have different behaviors and skills. I don't think his lack of social skills is worse than e.g. the lack of English skills of some of the contributors. In both cases the intentions are not bad, but the message might be difficult to understand and thus can be misunderstood. These people shouldn't be marginalized just because of their lack of skills. As an example, I recently found out that one contributor on the tracker that sounded somewhat annoying actually was a ~10 years old kid. From that point of view his contributions went from somewhat annoying to quite impressive (and I think some of his patches have been committed too). Of course if people have an intentionally destructive behavior they can be stopped.

As Nick pointed out, the problem isn't who he was coming in to the Python community. The problem is that he hasn't learned to support the community instead of tear it down, after *years* of effort on the community's part.

...

This is not elitism nor censorship but a simple manner of respecting each other. Think: out of respect for Guido's (or other senior devs') time

I heard this argument several time, but I'm not sure it's a really strong one. No one is forced to spend his time in any specific way. Granted, as a contributor you end up spending some of your time for this kind of things as well, but that also includes skimming through mails/comments that you don't care about, tell people that they wrote to wrong ML, that the issue they reported is invalid and so on. If people spend time reading his messages and responding to him, I assume they have reasons to do it. If this turns out to be ineffective they should stop.

The problem, again, is not the individual posts, but the effect on the community as a whole. If we don't deal with Anatoly in one way or another such that he is not having a bad effect on our community, then there are many many people whose lives will be worse off (including ours) because the community is *less* welcoming because of Anatoly's actions within it.

(Note that this argument may apply in different degrees to different forums.)

Please be clear that I am not saying his *criticisms* should be silenced. Far from it: if he treated our community with respect I think he would be a valuable contributor!

...

we should put an end to this. Judging from the YouTube view count, humanity has spent over 3000 years watching Gangnam Style. How much time did humanity spend on this thread and all other non-constructive threads/issues fired by Anatoly?

This is not necessarily non-constructive. We have identified a problem and we are discussing about the possible ways it can be solved, while learning how to deal with similar problem should they occur again in the future.

Yes, this is a conversation that it a good thing to have, regardless of Anatoly. It is a discussion about who we as a community want to be in the world. A very valuable discussion, and one that should not and can not be confined just to this list.

As Brian said, this is a long conversation. It is one that should never stop. But even this first part, getting clear on who we want to be right now, is not going to conclude in the next few days, or weeks, or even months. It actually started some time back, at least as long ago as the diversity list, and continuing through the CoC discussion.

This is really just the next step in that process.

--David

On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:54:01 +0100, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:

Le mercredi 26 décembre 2012 à 08:08 -0800, Eli Bendersky a écrit :

...

At the risk of stating something that I imagine everyone already knows, this list is itself publicly viewable: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers So in some sense what we write here is already being said beyond this list (though not actively). For example, the thread we're engaging in right now is the second result when Googling "python anatoly". I guess my point is that what's going on is already pretty open to the outside (from a read-only perspective).

Ouch, this is important to keep in mind. Thanks for the reminder, Chris.

This may be a different discussion altogether, but I'm pretty sure that sometimes people write to this list assuming it's private to committers only. Should it be?

I personally think it is very sane for this list to be public.

And I agree, as I noted previously in the middle of a longer post :)

--David

Dnia 26 gru 2012 o godz. 17:54 Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> napisał(a):

I personally think it is very sane for this list to be public.

Absolutely.

-- Best regards, Łukasz Langa

Wiadomość napisana przez Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> w dniu 26 gru 2012, o godz. 17:56:

At the end he thanked me for bringing this up with him, and apparently he is willing to improve.

Full disclosure: I'm not buying it.

But I'd *love* to be proven wrong and am willing to give him time to show that his attitude improved. At worst, we can treat your conversation as the "explicit warning" other committers asked about.

-- Best regards, Łukasz Langa

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 7:37 PM, R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com>wrote:

...

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:

...

I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply "I don't have time to deal with [people]

On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:20:06 +0200, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote: like

...

...

him."

This is somewhat surprising to me. Why would they have to deal with him? If the "people like him" were the core developers I could understand the problem, but he is just one of the many contributors.

Because, to put it in new age-y terms, his bad vibrations are poisoning the environment.

I considered this but probably underestimated it -- after all there are many other contributors that produce enough "good vibrations". My skewed perception might be due to the fact that I don't contribute actively to the python-dev/ideas MLs.

That is perhaps a graphic way to put it, but it is a matter of community tone and nurturing a joyful and creative environment in which all are welcome and feel encouraged to contribute.

Anatoly works against that, almost constantly. Encouraging him to support the community would be *much* better than banning him...but we've tried that.

...

...

The other case was sadder though: "Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly."

I'm not sure I understand this. ISTM that the problem here is with core devs, that are unable to deal with criticism (and have to resort to bans ;) rather than with him.

By "not understand", I presume you mean the "sadder" comment.

It is not that we are *unable* to deal with criticism. We have dealt reasonably with every criticism he has leveled, I think. But his comments create the *perception* that we are not dealing well with criticism, because he is not but casts the aspersion onto us, while we do that much less frequently to him, but do occasionally lapse into returning tit for tat. Since we are perceived as the ones in the position of power, we get castigated for our actions and reactions much more than Anatoly, the one perceived to be powerless in the situation, ever will be.

Let me repeat that bit, it is important. We are perceived as being the ones in the position of power, and he the powerless. That perception (and the reality behind it) will color every conversation that the wider community has about this issue. That is why I stress that our position and our actions have to come from well articulated principles, otherwise they will be perceived as caprice.

Which, I think, is more or less why you are arguing we should not take action.

Good point, and that's indeed one of the reasons why I'm against taking actions. If we do people might get scared away because they don't want to be banned or because they think we are not open to criticism or new ideas.

However, dealing reasonably with him gets harder and harder over time. It is a failing in me as a person, but every time I see a message from Anatoly, my gut clenches up and I go into a defensive mode, and want to prove him wrong.

Knowing this, I actually try to see if there's something good in his suggestions so that they don't get overlooked by devs that are ignoring him (that depends on the issues though).

So I have to master myself and try to speak reasonably, and try to not give back to him what he gives to us. I hope I'm getting better at that, but...

That's laudable, and I wish everyone else would do that.

Take issue 16781 as a recent example. I wanted to prove him wrong, both because of his past actions and because of my perception (probably colored by those past actions) of his choice of title for the issue ("execfile/exec messes up...") But there is a real (documentation) issue there.

We discussed about that, but unfortunately I missed the original title. My criticism (albeit mild) was about the use of the word "magical(ly)" that seems to imply that the behavior of Python is magical and obscure. He said that from his point of view the behavior looked magical, and I don't think he meant it as a non-constructive criticism against Python.

I managed to moderate my tone...almost. I still failed: I said "the fact that the print works should be a clue", implying that he should have seen it himself, But if I were dealing with anyone else, I would have said, "The fact that the print works is a clue..."

This difference is *subtle*. But those subtleties are *important* in determining the tone of a community, the supportiveness of a community, the openness of a community, the inclusiveness of a community. Someone reading my comment on that bug without knowing Anatoly's history would think that the Python community is very stuck up. It is so easy to forget that our words to Anatoly are not read just by him, but by many many other people.

This also work in the opposite directions. We might give more weight to some word or expressions than he actually meant to convey (see the "magical" example).

Anatoly spreads negativity almost (but not every!) time he opens his mouth, negativity which is then compounded by our natural human reactions to his tone. Yes it would be great if we could all master ourselves and always speak to him reasonably no matter the provocation, and yes we absolutely should strive very hard for that goal. It should be one of our guiding principles as a community.

But is that enough?

Remember, the issue isn't just *us*, the issue is also the effect on people with whom we never interact directly, people who may flee the community, or not join it, because of the negativity produced by both sides.

That's why we shouldn't produce it from our side, especially because we are in many. If he's fighting alone, the negativity will be isolated and ignored, but if we fight back it will broadcasted throughout the community.

Personally I'm very patient, and it's almost impossible to offend me or get me angry, but I understand other people have problems controlling their feelings in some circumstances.

Full disclosure: despite arguing here for *doing something* about Anatoly, I am in fact somewhat ambivalent about what. I have no problem with banning him for specific actions (such as a ban from the tracker for repeatedly reopening an issue). But what, if any, other actions should be taken I am not clear on.

...

...

We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and safe place to contribute.

And a side effect of being welcoming is that you get every kind of people. Different people have different behaviors and skills. I don't think his lack of social skills is worse than e.g. the lack of English skills of some of the contributors. In both cases the intentions are not bad, but the message might be difficult to understand and thus can be misunderstood. These people shouldn't be marginalized just because of their lack of skills. As an example, I recently found out that one contributor on the tracker that sounded somewhat annoying actually was a ~10 years old kid. From that point of view his contributions went from somewhat annoying to quite impressive (and I think some of his patches have been committed too). Of course if people have an intentionally destructive behavior they can be stopped.

As Nick pointed out, the problem isn't who he was coming in to the Python community. The problem is that he hasn't learned to support the community instead of tear it down, after *years* of effort on the community's part.

That might be because the problem came up explicitly only recently. He got some signs before, but either he missed them, he didn't think the problem was so serious, or he was unable to solve it. Now that he has been warned explicitly and the problem has been made clear, I hope he'll manage to find a solution (and he seems to be willing to do it).

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Chris Jerdonek <chris.jerdonek@gmail.com>wrote:

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:28 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com> wrote:

...

...

On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote:

...

I'm seriously considering writing all this as a PEP (most likely without any personal details). I hope this won't be useful in the future but it might help having this gathered as written policy, if only for transparency reasons.

This strike me as over-reaction.

I'm not at all sure that it is, but that "most likely" had better be replaced by "most certainly". Such a policy needs to rest on fundamental principles. "Bad cases make bad law", so one must be careful not to craft a policy to deal only with a specific egregious thing, but rather craft something that will serve well in the general cases. Specifically, any such policy, and any statement made if we take action on Anatoly, will have to address the inevitable calls that we are engaging in censorship. There are principled answers to that charge, but we must decide which of them we are following and why, and articulate that clearly and consistently.

+1. It might seem bureaucratic to some, but I think grounding actions in due process and documented policy is important. The Diversity Statement is a good example of this. (That statement has a different purpose though. It's more about something we want rather than how to handle something we don't want.):

http://www.python.org/community/diversity/

What is CoC by the way?

Code of Conduct.

-Brett

...

As an aside, it has occurred to me that the fundamental problem here is that we do not feel that Anatoly respects *us*. So it is no wonder that we are offended and do not respect him.

FWIW, I've found him to be more what I'd call spammy/annoying and lacking in some areas rather than disrespectful (opening many issues with vague descriptions, starting more than his share of threads on python-ideas, etc). So I've never felt offended. Granted, I'm relatively new to being involved and don't follow him closely. I quickly learned to pass over most of what he writes for lack of time. It's a source of amazement to me that what he writes sometimes leads to something productive.

This is where I disagree with everyone who is defending Anatoly as someone who can be redeemed and given yet another chance to allow him to continue to poison the community where he participates because he is just "annoying". On python-dev I checked my email on Xmas morning to an email from Anatoly where he said "What should I do in case Eric lost interest after his GSoC project for PSF appeared as useless for python-dev community". That is not "spammy/annoying" but flat-out disrespectful and rude.

I think I was the first person to publicly state I put Anatoly's email into the trash after he publicly said the PSF board should be completely disbanded and we should restructure the PSF because he viewed it as worthless. That was not annoying but disrespectful.

We have spent **years** trying to get him to be more productive and yet he manages to not to. He flat-out refuses to sign any contributor agreement and expects us to do all the work and gets mad when we don't spend our free time fixing what he wants us to. He won't even search the internet for prior discussions as David has pointed out. That's not annoying but disrespectful.

I fully understand that we are all nice people and don't want to do anything drastic, but simply ignoring him doesn't solve the issue for new people to the community who come to python-ideas, python-dev, or even the tracker on occasion and actually take the time to read his emails, reply, etc. and don't realize that a decent chunk of core developers never even see their responses as the entire thread has already been deleted/muted in the core dev's inbox. If I was new and spent some time replying to a thread only to find out that the person was being ignored and thus my hard work as well I would be frustrated.

In order to deal with this, here is my proposal that should placate those of us calling for a ban now and those that feel like there has not been enough of a warning ((I can't communicate with him because I want him banned and I personally don't get along with him even in person, so any place where someone should talk to him it can't be me in the name of fairness to the process):

1. Someone emails Anatoly to tell him he is on indefinite probation for his behaviour where it is pointed out he can no longer insult anyone (including the PSF), he can't re-open issues without an explicit solution to the problem for why it closed, and in general has to just behave and not be rude

2. We agree to point out to him nicely and calmly when he has screwed up and overstepped his bounds while on this probation and to record when that happened (an email here about any incident should be enough) so that he can learn from his mistakes

3. If we do not see a pattern of improvement (this can be noticed by anyone and I'm sure we can get a consensus on it; unanimity is not required because that is impossible for anything with a group of our size), he gets cut off from the resource he is abusing the most and those cut-offs will continue on other locations if he does not improve there as well

4. If it goes as far as he is cut off and he manages to get the point and behaves elsewhere he can be allowed back on to where he has been banned after a year has passed (IOW he has to show actual improvement)

Three key points in this proposal. One is that he gets an official warning; no more side discussions with core devs, no more "does he know people want to ban him" questions as it will be clear and explicit. He will be flat-out told his attitude and actions are not acceptable as they stand and they need to change.

Two is that there is no time limit so that he doesn't just hide away for e.g. six months, comes back, and then starts stirring up trouble while saying he behaved within the allotted time that he had to. Any change needs to be permanent and perpetuate forever.

Three, the cut-offs are gradual per resource so that it isn't an over-arching nuclear option.

I say Ezio lets him know that this is the plan since he talked to him recently and is in the no-ban-yet camp. But even if people don't like the explicit steps as I have outlined them as a general rule, someone who doesn't want him banned should tell him flat-out that he is on thin ice as I am an admin for python-ideas and this plan is what I will institute starting January 1 for that list and he is on the top of the list of people who will be in trouble if their attitude does not change (I am about to email Titus about drafting up a CoC for python-ideas so that this applies to everyone, not just Anatoly).

I would caution against using hypothetical "new people" (that maybe possibly could be offended in some way that might create harm either to that person or the community) as a reason for taking this action. Does anyone know if this has actually occurred? And in any significant numbers?

I see a group of hard working core developers that are frustrated quite legitimately and struggling with policing the content of official message boards, but that energy might push you in directions that are more harmful than not.

Be sure of who you are acting against, the person more than the emails. There is strong incidence of mental illness in the tech community and there are also persons with significantly different email personalities than actual personality.

I see Anatoly as someone who isn't a mean person but might not be a proper communicator. Openness and inclusion is a higher good than censorship and elitism.

Best, John.

On Dec 28, 2012, at 9:38 PM, Chris Jerdonek <chris.jerdonek@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

...

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Chris Jerdonek <chris.jerdonek@gmail.com> wrote:

...

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:28 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com> wrote:

...

...

On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote:

...

I'm seriously considering writing all this as a PEP (most likely without any personal details). I hope this won't be useful in the future but it might help having this gathered as written policy, if only for transparency reasons.

This strike me as over-reaction.

I'm not at all sure that it is, but that "most likely" had better be replaced by "most certainly". Such a policy needs to rest on fundamental principles. "Bad cases make bad law", so one must be careful not to craft a policy to deal only with a specific egregious thing, but rather craft something that will serve well in the general cases. Specifically, any such policy, and any statement made if we take action on Anatoly, will have to address the inevitable calls that we are engaging in censorship. There are principled answers to that charge, but we must decide which of them we are following and why, and articulate that clearly and consistently.

+1. It might seem bureaucratic to some, but I think grounding actions in due process and documented policy is important. The Diversity Statement is a good example of this. (That statement has a different purpose though. It's more about something we want rather than how to handle something we don't want.):

http://www.python.org/community/diversity/

What is CoC by the way?

Code of Conduct.

-Brett

...

...

As an aside, it has occurred to me that the fundamental problem here is that we do not feel that Anatoly respects *us*. So it is no wonder that we are offended and do not respect him.

FWIW, I've found him to be more what I'd call spammy/annoying and lacking in some areas rather than disrespectful (opening many issues with vague descriptions, starting more than his share of threads on python-ideas, etc). So I've never felt offended. Granted, I'm relatively new to being involved and don't follow him closely. I quickly learned to pass over most of what he writes for lack of time. It's a source of amazement to me that what he writes sometimes leads to something productive.

This is where I disagree with everyone who is defending Anatoly as someone who can be redeemed and given yet another chance to allow him to continue to poison the community where he participates because he is just "annoying". On python-dev I checked my email on Xmas morning to an email from Anatoly where he said "What should I do in case Eric lost interest after his GSoC project for PSF appeared as useless for python-dev community". That is not "spammy/annoying" but flat-out disrespectful and rude.

I think I was the first person to publicly state I put Anatoly's email into the trash after he publicly said the PSF board should be completely disbanded and we should restructure the PSF because he viewed it as worthless. That was not annoying but disrespectful.

We have spent **years** trying to get him to be more productive and yet he manages to not to. He flat-out refuses to sign any contributor agreement and expects us to do all the work and gets mad when we don't spend our free time fixing what he wants us to. He won't even search the internet for prior discussions as David has pointed out. That's not annoying but disrespectful.

I fully understand that we are all nice people and don't want to do anything drastic, but simply ignoring him doesn't solve the issue for new people to the community who come to python-ideas, python-dev, or even the tracker on occasion and actually take the time to read his emails, reply, etc. and don't realize that a decent chunk of core developers never even see their responses as the entire thread has already been deleted/muted in the core dev's inbox. If I was new and spent some time replying to a thread only to find out that the person was being ignored and thus my hard work as well I would be frustrated.

In order to deal with this, here is my proposal that should placate those of us calling for a ban now and those that feel like there has not been enough of a warning ((I can't communicate with him because I want him banned and I personally don't get along with him even in person, so any place where someone should talk to him it can't be me in the name of fairness to the process):

1. Someone emails Anatoly to tell him he is on indefinite probation for his behaviour where it is pointed out he can no longer insult anyone (including the PSF), he can't re-open issues without an explicit solution to the problem for why it closed, and in general has to just behave and not be rude

2. We agree to point out to him nicely and calmly when he has screwed up and overstepped his bounds while on this probation and to record when that happened (an email here about any incident should be enough) so that he can learn from his mistakes

3. If we do not see a pattern of improvement (this can be noticed by anyone and I'm sure we can get a consensus on it; unanimity is not required because that is impossible for anything with a group of our size), he gets cut off from the resource he is abusing the most and those cut-offs will continue on other locations if he does not improve there as well

4. If it goes as far as he is cut off and he manages to get the point and behaves elsewhere he can be allowed back on to where he has been banned after a year has passed (IOW he has to show actual improvement)

Three key points in this proposal. One is that he gets an official warning; no more side discussions with core devs, no more "does he know people want to ban him" questions as it will be clear and explicit. He will be flat-out told his attitude and actions are not acceptable as they stand and they need to change.

Two is that there is no time limit so that he doesn't just hide away for e.g. six months, comes back, and then starts stirring up trouble while saying he behaved within the allotted time that he had to. Any change needs to be permanent and perpetuate forever.

Three, the cut-offs are gradual per resource so that it isn't an over-arching nuclear option.

I say Ezio lets him know that this is the plan since he talked to him recently and is in the no-ban-yet camp. But even if people don't like the explicit steps as I have outlined them as a general rule, someone who doesn't want him banned should tell him flat-out that he is on thin ice as I am an admin for python-ideas and this plan is what I will institute starting January 1 for that list and he is on the top of the list of people who will be in trouble if their attitude does not change (I am about to email Titus about drafting up a CoC for python-ideas so that this applies to everyone, not just Anatoly).

Thanks, Brett. These steps sound great to me. It would be good if the e-mail for (1) is posted here (either before or after sending but preferably before). Is Ezio being asked to let him know about (1) through (4) or to actually do (1)? To make the e-mail official, it should say it is being sent on behalf of this group or be signed by more than one person and CC more than one core dev.

Also, for the record I never meant to defend Anatoly and don't personally believe he can be redeemed. I just felt he should be officially warned as a matter of process. Also, I admit that I was wrong in implying that he didn't disrespect the group or community. His recent e-mail about Eric's project was terrible. It was more how I felt personally because there is a point at which you start disregarding and not taking seriously anything a person says (he is past that point). The point about new people who don't have that understanding yet is a very good one.

--Chris

---

python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers

Le vendredi 28 décembre 2012 à 22:15 +0000, John Benediktsson a écrit :

Be sure of who you are acting against, the person more than the emails. There is strong incidence of mental illness in the tech community and there are also persons with significantly different email personalities than actual personality.

I see Anatoly as someone who isn't a mean person but might not be a proper communicator.

The question is not whether Anatoly is mean or ill-motivated, or what his "actual" personality is, but whether his online behaviour should be perpetually accepted. Anatoly has often been disruptive, taking up precious contributor time for petty controversies.

Perhaps ideally there's a way to make Anatoly aware of his communication problems and help him change for the better, but so far nobody's been able to achieve that.

Regards

Antoine.

Am 26.12.12 14:28, schrieb R. David Murray:

I wonder if a public discussion aimed at developing such a policy would clue Anatoly in (probably not). I wonder what other communities have done.

Wrt. anatoly techtonik? I don't know (beyond episodal knowledge with Rietveld and Roundup)

In general for this kind of behavior: I still think he fits the description in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q52kFL8zVoM&feature=gv

I think he is poisenous to the Python project. If you haven't seen the video, please watch it all.

Regards, Martin

Am 29.12.12 01:21, schrieb Brett Cannon:

It doesn't matter to me who writes the email. I was not thinking so formally, bit it wouldn't hurt.

So has any action been taken? If not, I'll communicate it to him. I'm personally worried most about the tracker, so I'd propose the policy

• he must not reopen any issues. If he really thinks important information was not considered, he can post them to the closed issue.
• he must not resubmit a duplicate of one of his closed issues.

Regards, Martin

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 1:50 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:

...

Am 29.12.12 01:21, schrieb Brett Cannon:

...

It doesn't matter to me who writes the email. I was not thinking so formally, bit it wouldn't hurt.

So has any action been taken?

I haven't talked with him again yet. If I don't get a chance to do it in the following days I'll write him an email.

I think it's important that this be done in the form of an official e-mail as Brett originally suggested, so that it's clear to everyone what was said and is not just another side discussion.

--Chris

...

If not, I'll communicate it to him. I'm personally worried most about the tracker, so I'd propose the policy

• he must not reopen any issues. If he really thinks important information was not considered, he can post them to the closed issue.
• he must not resubmit a duplicate of one of his closed issues.

I think I mentioned this last time we talked, and I'll make sure to make it clearer next time.

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

...

Regards, Martin

---

python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers

2012/12/30 Meador Inge <meadori@gmail.com>:

• WIlling to complain, but not help fix anything
• Is this person draining attention and focus?
• Is this person paralyzing the project?

I don't understand how Anatoly plans to help Python with such project: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-December/018339.html "Documenting Python warts on Stack Overflow"

I'm not sure that I understood correctly his idea, but it sounds very negative to me. (I didn't know the english word "wart". It's not something positive according to Wikipedia.)

Anatoly is poisoning the Python project because he's flooding quite all communication channels used by Python developers with his ideas. How a new developer learning Python will react when he sees such email? Does it mean that the Python language sucks and is full of bugs or traps?

Victor

On Jan 1, 2013, at 11:54 AM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

...

[...] In order to deal with this, here is my proposal that should placate those of us calling for a ban now and those that feel like there has not been enough of a warning ((I can't communicate with him because I want him banned and I personally don't get along with him even in person, so any place where someone should talk to him it can't be me in the name of fairness to the process):

1. Someone emails Anatoly to tell him he is on indefinite probation for his behaviour where it is pointed out he can no longer insult anyone (including the PSF), he can't re-open issues without an explicit solution to the problem for why it closed, and in general has to just behave and not be rude

2. We agree to point out to him nicely and calmly when he has screwed up and overstepped his bounds while on this probation and to record when that happened (an email here about any incident should be enough) so that he can learn from his mistakes

3. If we do not see a pattern of improvement (this can be noticed by anyone and I'm sure we can get a consensus on it; unanimity is not required because that is impossible for anything with a group of our size), he gets cut off from the resource he is abusing the most and those cut-offs will continue on other locations if he does not improve there as well

4. If it goes as far as he is cut off and he manages to get the point and behaves elsewhere he can be allowed back on to where he has been banned after a year has passed (IOW he has to show actual improvement)

Three key points in this proposal. One is that he gets an official warning; no more side discussions with core devs, no more "does he know people want to ban him" questions as it will be clear and explicit. He will be flat-out told his attitude and actions are not acceptable as they stand and they need to change.

Two is that there is no time limit so that he doesn't just hide away for e.g. six months, comes back, and then starts stirring up trouble while saying he behaved within the allotted time that he had to. Any change needs to be permanent and perpetuate forever.

Three, the cut-offs are gradual per resource so that it isn't an over-arching nuclear option.

I say Ezio lets him know that this is the plan since he talked to him recently and is in the no-ban-yet camp.

Yesterday I talked to him, informed him about the probation and showed him this message. I hope this is official enough.

We also discussed about the contributor agreement and IIUC:

1. he signed it already 1.5 years ago but apparently it got lost (that wouldn't be too surprising if it really happened);
2. he thinks the current agreement is "invalid" because the PSF doesn't follow the terms and requirements of the linked Apache 2 license (and while he doesn't seem against signing in, that would be quite pointless if it was indeed invalid);
3. he said that an electronic signature like the one at the bottom of http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html should be used instead of printing/scanning/mailing the agreement (this (or some similar suggestion) already came up a few times here).

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

All of this is moot; we have a new admin; we are working towards electronic signatures, but it uses the same CLA as before; the terms and licenses are not different.

If he refuses to sign and send in the current CLA then that's his choice, and his contributions will not be included.

If he has specific legal concerns about the CLA backed by legal standing, he can send them to psf@python.org and we will have legal counsel review them.

...

But even if people don't like the explicit steps as I have outlined them as a general rule, someone who doesn't want him banned should tell him flat-out that he is on thin ice as I am an admin for python-ideas and this plan is what I will institute starting January 1 for that list and he is on the top of the list of people who will be in trouble if their attitude does not change (I am about to email Titus about drafting up a CoC for python-ideas so that this applies to everyone, not just Anatoly).

---

python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers

On Jan 1, 2013, at 2:03 PM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 7:06 PM, Jesse Noller <jnoller@gmail.com> wrote:

...

On Jan 1, 2013, at 11:54 AM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hi,

[...]

We also discussed about the contributor agreement and IIUC:

1. he signed it already 1.5 years ago but apparently it got lost (that wouldn't be too surprising if it really happened);
2. he thinks the current agreement is "invalid" because the PSF doesn't follow the terms and requirements of the linked Apache 2 license (and while he doesn't seem against signing in, that would be quite pointless if it was indeed invalid);
3. he said that an electronic signature like the one at the bottom of http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html should be used instead of printing/scanning/mailing the agreement (this (or some similar suggestion) already came up a few times here).

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

All of this is moot; we have a new admin; we are working towards electronic signatures,

That's good news.

...

but it uses the same CLA as before; the terms and licenses are not different. If he refuses to sign and send in the current CLA then that's his choice, and his contributions will not be included.

IIUC he's also saying that a CLA doesn't necessarily require to be linked to one or more external licenses, i.e. you can agree to contribute under the terms of the CLA alone and that should be enough. The Google individual CLA seems to do this. The problem with linking to external licenses is that *in theory* it requires you (and him) to read, understand, and accept their terms before putting your signature on the agreement. In practice people are too lazy to do it and/or they don't care, so the only common problem is that contributors don't know which one to pick and ask you if you can lend them a coin to flip. So, unless there's some specific reason preventing it, it should be possible to simplify our CLA and make it "self-contained" so that contributors can easily understand what they are signing (IANAL, but it seems to work for Google).

Precisely. None of us are lawyers; the CLA was made by lawyers to be compatible with the Python license "stack" which has its own set of issues.

That all said; again, the likelihood of short term alteration of the CLA is a non starter, so he can feel free to take his time to understand why we require contributions to be licensed to the PSF under the listed licenses.

However; I've sent this to a real lawyer for his opinion.

...

If he has specific legal concerns about the CLA backed by legal standing, he can send them to psf@python.org and we will have legal counsel review them.

I think the problem (or one of the problems) is that the Apache license (http://opensource.org/licenses/apache2.0.php) requires that, among other things, "You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files". I'm not sure if we are doing this, if we really are required to do it, and what are the implications if we don't do it. These are probably questions that a lawyer should answer (but OTOH contributors should be able to understand it without being lawyers themselves).

I sent it to a lawyer. Note the CLA was designed by PSF legal counsel, to whom I have sent this thread.

Also note that these issues are somewhat orthogonal. Electronic signatures a simpler CLA are about improving and simplifying the process, while the issues with the Apache license could be an actual problem (that might be solved if the external licenses are removed by the CLA). The combination of the two issues is probably making him uncomfortable about signing, even if he stated that we are free to use his patches on the bug tracker as we wish (but we can't without contribution form -- unless they are trivial). IOW, from his point of view, he is willing to contribute, but before doing so he has to sign the contributor form. Since he wants to understand what he is signing (and this is not an unreasonable request), he also has to read and understand the linked licenses, and because there are parts of them that are not yet clear to him, he is reluctant about signing. (Disclaimer: the views expressed in this and some of the others email I wrote solely represent my understanding of the issues, and do not necessarily represent the actual views of anatoly.)

If he signed it 1.5 years ago, the CLA has not changed. Ergo, I fail to see what the issue is today.

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

Hi Ezio,

Le mardi 01 janvier 2013 à 18:54 +0200, Ezio Melotti a écrit :

We also discussed about the contributor agreement and IIUC:

1. he signed it already 1.5 years ago but apparently it got lost (that wouldn't be too surprising if it really happened);

Yes, I think lost contributor agreements have already happened.

2. he thinks the current agreement is "invalid" because the PSF doesn't follow the terms and requirements of the linked Apache 2 license (and while he doesn't seem against signing in, that would be quite pointless if it was indeed invalid);

If he believes that, he can still choose the Academic Free License instead.

cheers

Antoine.

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 10:57 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl@gmx.net> wrote:

On 01/01/2013 05:54 PM, Ezio Melotti wrote:

...

I say Ezio lets him know that this is the plan since he talked to him
recently and is in the no-ban-yet camp.

Yesterday I talked to him, informed him about the probation and showed him this message. I hope this is official enough.

So, what was the reaction? That is the important thing to know...

He acknowledged the fact, but I think he had already understood the issue from our previous conversation.

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

P.S. somehow Gmail was sending HTML mails instead of plain text ones. I now changed it back to plain text -- apologies for any inconvenience this might have caused, and thanks to Trent for making me aware of the problem! :)

Georg

Hello,

Le mardi 01 janvier 2013 à 15:55 -0600, Brian Curtin a écrit :

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 10:57 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl@gmx.net> wrote:

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On 01/01/2013 05:54 PM, Ezio Melotti wrote:

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I say Ezio lets him know that this is the plan since he talked to him
recently and is in the no-ban-yet camp.

Yesterday I talked to him, informed him about the probation and showed him this message. I hope this is official enough.

So, what was the reaction? That is the important thing to know...

He acknowledged the fact, but I think he had already understood the issue from our previous conversation.

...and?

Does he care about what was said? Is he going to do anything about his actions? The fact that this discussion sidetracked into contributor agreements is not a good sign to me. He should have just said those things himself to the PSF's legal counsel, not in response to an email about his behavior...

Well, he's now aware (with public recording thereof) of how we feel about his contributions. So if he doesn't amend his ways a little, we will be justified in taking action.

Regards

Antoine.

On 01/01/2013 11:13 PM, Ezio Melotti wrote:

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 11:55 PM, Brian Curtin <brian@python.org> wrote:

...

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 10:57 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl@gmx.net> wrote:

...

On 01/01/2013 05:54 PM, Ezio Melotti wrote:

...

I say Ezio lets him know that this is the plan since he talked to him
recently and is in the no-ban-yet camp.

Yesterday I talked to him, informed him about the probation and showed him this message. I hope this is official enough.

So, what was the reaction? That is the important thing to know...

He acknowledged the fact, but I think he had already understood the issue from our previous conversation.

...and?

Does he care about what was said? Is he going to do anything about his actions?

He does, and he is already trying to improve. We already discussed about the issue and how to solve it in our previous conversation (see http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2012-December/002307.html), so informing him about the probation only served to let him know the specific punishment(s) he might face.

Good, sounds like we did all we can now.

...

The fact that this discussion sidetracked into contributor agreements is not a good sign to me. He should have just said those things himself to the PSF's legal counsel, not in response to an email about his behavior...

I'm doing this via chat (I think it's better/more effective than emails), so sidetracking is not so unexpected (we even ended up discussing things that are completely unrelated after we clarified the important points). The discussion about the CLA started because he said that some of the "accusations" in the thread are not true -- in particular that "He flat-out refuses to sign any contributor agreement". I asked him why he hasn't signed it and if there was any problem with the contributor agreement, and so he replied.

I still don't understand the CA issue: either he sent one some months back, and it got lost: then he can re-submit it. Or he thinks there is something wrong with it and it shouldn't be signed: then why did he do so in the first place (and frankly, why did nobody else (among them big corporations) find a cause for concern)?

cheers, Georg

On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl@gmx.net> wrote:

I still don't understand the CA issue: either he sent one some months back, and it got lost: then he can re-submit it.

Apparently he did and it got lost, and I hope he will resubmit it again now.

Or he thinks there is something wrong with it and it shouldn't be signed: then why did he do so in the first place

I think someone managed to convince him that it was at least "acceptable". I.e., the CLA still has some problems and/or parts that are not 100% clear to him, and he would like to see these problems addressed and solved, but in the meanwhile he can make a compromise and sign it anyway if it's necessary.

(and frankly, why did nobody else (among them big corporations) find a cause for concern)?

Because usually no one spends time reading and understanding all the fine prints and signs it because "if everyone else signed it, it can't be too wrong/bad". Indeed this shouldn't happen to big corporations, but it might also be that they failed to recognize the problem or they didn't care because it didn't affect them directly. Of course it could also be a misunderstanding of the license terms from his part, but in this case he would probably want a clarification.

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti

cheers, Georg

Am I the only one feeling uncomfortable about having such a discussion take place on a public mailing list? I mean, we're debating whether to ban him from the tracker/mailing lists, but to me, this whole thread is much more harmful than any other action we could take. Imagine what will happen when his friends/boss/prospective employer will google him: how would you feel if this kind of thread showed up out there on the internet when searching your name? I'm all for open mailing lists and archives when it comes to development/security/community, but here it's really a personal issue, and I think it should be handled privately (by who is another debate).

cf

Le mardi 01 janvier 2013 à 23:39 +0100, Charles-François Natali a écrit :

Am I the only one feeling uncomfortable about having such a discussion take place on a public mailing list? I mean, we're debating whether to ban him from the tracker/mailing lists, but to me, this whole thread is much more harmful than any other action we could take. Imagine what will happen when his friends/boss/prospective employer will google him: how would you feel if this kind of thread showed up out there on the internet when searching your name? I'm all for open mailing lists and archives when it comes to development/security/community, but here it's really a personal issue, and I think it should be handled privately (by who is another debate).

I think personal issues in a community are always community issues. It is as much a discussion of how we value, appreciate and judge people, as a question of whether Anatoly's behaviour should be stopped.

Also, I tend to think the "what will happen when XXX googles him" argument is a fallacy: if someone is participating publicly in an online community, outsiders can inevitably judge them on the quality of their participation. It is much too late to do anything against that, since there are many public records of our interactions with Anatoly.

My 2 cents.

Regards

Antoine.

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Jesse Noller <jnoller@gmail.com> wrote:

Precisely. None of us are lawyers; the CLA was made by lawyers to be compatible with the Python license "stack" which has its own set of issues.

That all said; again, the likelihood of short term alteration of the CLA is a non starter, so he can feel free to take his time to understand why we require contributions to be licensed to the PSF under the listed licenses.

However; I've sent this to a real lawyer for his opinion.

Since this came up again on python-dev, did you ever receive any reply from the real lawyer?

Best Regards, Ezio Melotti