Hi all, I would like to pitch in here, I am sorry that I didn't have the time before...
First, I want to disclose that recently Continuum made a research gift to the Jupyter project; we were just now writing up a blog post to acknowledge this, but in light of this discussion, I feel that I should say this up front so folks can gauge any potential bias accordingly. On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 3:44 AM, Travis Oliphant <tra...@continuum.io> wrote: > I'm actually offended that so many at BIDS seem eager to crucify my > intentions when I've done nothing but give away my time, my energy, my > resources, and my sleep to NumPy for many, many years. I guess if your > intent is to drive me away, then you are succeeding. Travis, first, I'd like to kindly ask you not to conflate BIDS, an institution where a large number of people work, with the personal opinions of some, who happen to work there but in this case are speaking only for themselves. You say "so many at BIDS", but as far as I know, your disagreements are with Stefan and Nathaniel (Matthew doesn't work at BIDS). You are painting with a very wide brush the work of many people, and in the process, unfairly impacting others who have nothing to do with this. If anything, the only things I'm aware BIDS has done in an official capacity regarding you or Continuum is to offer hosting for Continuum developers at the DS4DS workshop and beyond (after an explicit request by Matt Rocklin, and one we were delighted to honor), and our hosting of your lecture in our Friday Data Science Lecture Series last week. With that out of the way... 1. I hope the discussion can move past the suspicion and innuendo about Continuum and Travis. I haven't always agreed with how Travis communicates some of his ideas, and I've said it to him in such instances (e.g. this weekend, as I myself was surprised at how his last round of comments had landed on the list a few days back). But I also have worked closely with him for years because I know that he has proven, not in words, but in actions, that he has the best interests of our community at heart, and that he is willing to try and do everything in his power to help whenever he can. When we founded Numfocus back in 2012, it would have been impossible for it to really bootstrap without Travis' generosity, since he effectively footed the bill for resources that were critically needed at the start. And yet, he was always willing to take every step necessary to help Numfocus grow independent of Continuum, so that it could be a real community asset: today, there's not a single Continuum employee on the NF board (Travis and I both resigned from the board a while back to allow for some fresh blood). The creation and open-sourcing of conda has also been a critical contribution, that I know many of us have benefited from: we all carry the scars from the python packaging horror shows, and conda/anaconda has been a life-changer. The fact that conda itself is open, means we have a core tool that we can build upon. To put it bluntly, few people in the whole world have given more of their life, energy and resources to our community than Travis, and have done so as generously as he has. He may have made mistakes, and again, I often disagree with how he communicates. But accusations and innuendo like the ones in this thread are damaging, hurtful and useless. And one thing that I hope people will remember is that, famous and powerful as Travis may be, he's still our colleague, a member of our community, and *a human being*, so let's remember that as well... 2. Conflicts of interest are a fact of life, in fact, I would argue that every healthy and sufficiently interconnected community eventually *should* have conflicts of interest. They are a sign that there is activity across multiple centers of interest, and individuals with connections in multiple areas of the community. And we *want* folks who are engaged enough precisely to have such interests! For conflict of interest management, we don't need to reinvent the wheel, this is actually something where our beloved institutions, blessed be their bureaucratic souls, have tons of training materials that happen to be not completely useless. Most universities and the national labs have information on COIs that provides guidelines, and Numpy could include in its governance model more explicit language about COIs if desired. So, the issue is not to view COIs as something evil or undesirable, but rather as the very real consequence of operating in an interconnected set of institutions. And once you take that stance, you deal with that rationally and realistically. For example, you accept that companies aren't the only ones with potential COIs: *all* entities have them. As Ryan May aptly pointed out, the notion that academic institutions are somehow immune to hidden agendas or other interests is naive at best... And I say that as someone who has happily stayed in academia, resisting multiple overtures from industry over the years, but not out of some quaint notion that academia is a pristine haven of principled purity. Quite the opposite: in building large and complex projects, I've seen painfully close how the university/government research world has its own flavor of the same power, financial and political ugliness that we attribute to the commercial side. 3. Commercial actors. Following up on the last paragraph, we should accept that *all* institutions have agendas, not just companies. We live in a world with companies, and I think it's naive to take a knee-jerk anti-commercial stance: our community has had a productive and successful history of interaction with industry in the past, and hopefully that will continue in the future. What is true, however, is that community projects should maintain the "seat of power" in the community, and *not* in any single company. In fact, this is important even to ensure that many companies feel comfortable engaging the projects, precisely so they know that the technology is driven in an open and neutral way even if some of their competitors participate. That's why a governance model that is anchored in neutral ground is so important. We've worked hard to make Numfocus the legal entity that can play that role (that's why it's a 501(c)3), and that's why we've framed our governance model for Jupyter in a way that makes all the institutions (including Berkeley and Cal Poly) simply 'partners' that contribute by virtue of supporting employees. But the owners of the decisions are the *individuals* who do the work and form the community, not the companies/institutions. If we accept these premises, then hopefully we can have a rational conversation about how to build a community, where at any point in time, any of us should be judged on the merit of our actions, not the hypotheticals of our intentions or our affiliations (commercial, government, academic, etc). Sorry for the long wall of text, I rarely post on this list anymore. But I was saddened to see the turn of this thread, and I hope I can contribute some perspective (and not make things worse :) Cheers, -- Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org) fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!) fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail
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