[OFF-TOPIC] What's wrong with David T. Grove?

[Gurusamy Sarathy]

It has been brought to my attention that David T. Grove has yet again
been venting his peculiar brand of venom and FUD about ActiveState and
about my personal integrity.  I normally don't respond to his lies and
insinuations because they are all blatantly and obviously false.  But
since the Python crew probably aren't aware of his deceitful ways, I
feel compelled to point out a few things.

Here are some facts:

 1. David T. Grove was employed by ActiveState as a telecommuting
    contractor about two-and-a-half years ago.  He was laid-off
    (for reasons I'm not aware of, but can probably find out easily)
    before I started working for ActiveState in December 1998.
 2. David T. Grove has never contributed anything to the Perl community
    in terms of written code.  Not a single patch to the Perl sources,
    not a single line of Perl on CPAN, not even anything on Usenet
    (apparently) that I can find from a quick search of www.deja.com.
    For all his chatter about his "insanely great" IDE, the code is not
    freely available.
 3. David T. Grove has a history of abusing the charter of the Perl
    mailing lists, newsgroups, and other media such as The Perl Journal. [*]
    He has posted various unsubstantiated and false claims to the
    perl5-porters list in the past.  He tried to sneak in clearly off-topic
    advertisements into the comp.lang.perl.announce group.  He tried to
    deceitfully (and unsuccessfully) introduce an advertisement that
    pretended to be a regular article in the Perl Journal.  He enjoys
    the dubious distinction of having been banned from the Perl advocacy
    mailing list for being arrogant and off-topic.  That's only a small
    sample of his notoriety.
 4. ActiveState has spent countless man-hours in improving Perl and
    Python since I joined the company in December 1998.  All of these
    changes to the Perl and Python core have been contributed back
    into the respective communities.  For more info on this, see:
    http://ActiveState.com/Corporate/About_ActiveState/Open_Source_Community.html
 5. ActiveState is still the only company I know where one can hack the
    Perl source code and get paid for it.  If you know otherwise, I'd be
    happy to know.
 6. Nobody but me decided when Perl 5.6 would ship, and I decided to
    ship it when I considered it ready enough and timely enough.  As
    "pumpking", this was my prerogative, and I exercised it fairly and
    squarely.  If anyone says otherwise, they're either wrong or lying.

Here are some personal opinions:

 1. David T. Grove is a loon.  Ignore him.
 2. David T. Grove is also an incompetent programmer.  I know this because
    I had to fix the lousy code he wrote for ActiveState.
 3. If I knew or even suspected that ActiveState has less than honorable
    intentions about Perl or Python, I would have bailed a long time ago.
 4. I'm sure there are easier ways to make money than subverting open
    source projects.  If ActiveState didn't really care for the success
    of Perl and Python, the company would be in a different business
    altogether.
 5. If Perl or Python lose, ActiveState loses too.

In summary, be very wary of David T. Grove.  He usually states his lies
and deceptions as if they were facts, and insists on wasting everyones
time in this way.  A quick search on Google or Deja should tell you all
you need to know about him.

Please accept my apologies for the lack of python-related content in
this message--I find it impossible to watch quietly while this individual
tries to destroy another community of peers.

Good luck with Python,


Sarathy
gsar at ActiveState.com

[*] Some quick links:
P5P abuse:
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2000-04/msg00259.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/1999-05/msg00463.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/cgi-bin/w3glimpse/perl5-porters?query=David+Grove&errors=0&case=on&maxfiles=100&maxlines=30
CLPA abuse:
  http://x76.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=607620761&CONTEXT=971588747.899350574&hitnum=22
TPJ abuse:
  http://www.mail-archive.com/advocacy%40perl.org/msg00617.html