[Bitcoin-development] Proposal: Move Bitcoin Dev List to a Neutral Competent Entity

Jeff Garzik jgarzik at bitpay.com
Sun Jun 14 15:15:18 UTC 2015 

* ACK on moving away from SourceForge mailing lists - though only once a
community-welcomed replacement is up and running

* ACK on using LF as a mailing infrastructure provider

* Research secure mailing list models, for bitcoin-security.  The list is
not ultra high security - we all use PGP for that - but it would perhaps be
nice to find some spiffy cryptosystem where mailing list participants
individually hold keys & therefore access.


On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 6:12 AM, Warren Togami Jr. <wtogami at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Discomfort with Sourceforge
>
> For a while now people have been expressing concern about Sourceforge's
> continued hosting of the bitcoin-dev mailing list.  Downloads were moved
> completely to bitcoin.org after the Sept 2014 hacking incident of the SF
> project account.  The company's behavior and perceived stability have been
> growing to be increasingly questionable.
>
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/08/gimp_dumps_sourceforge_over_dodgy_ads_and_installer
>
> November 2013: GIMP flees SourceForge over dodgy ads and installer
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/646118/
>
> May 28th, 2015: SourceForge replacing GIMP Windows downloads
>
> http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2015/q2/194
>
> June 3rd, 2015: Sourceforge hijacked nmap's old site and downloads.
>
> When this topic came up over the past two years, it seemed that most
> people agreed it would be a good idea to move.  Someone always suggests
> Google Groups as the replacement host.  Google is quickly shot down as too
> controversial in this community, and it becomes an even more difficult
> question as to who else should host it.  Realizing this is not so simple,
> discussion then dies off until the next time somebody brings it up.
>
>
> http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/thread/1943127.DBnVxmfOIh%401337h4x0r/#msg34192607
>
> Somebody brought it up again this past week.
>
> It seems logical that an open discussion list is not a big deal to
> continue to be hosted on Sourceforge, as there isn’t much they could do to
> screw it up.  I personally think moving it away now would be seen as a
> gesture that we do not consider their behavior to be acceptable.  There are
> also some benefits in being hosted elsewhere, at an entity able to
> professionally maintain their infrastructure while also being neutral to
> the content.
>
> Proposal: Move Bitcoin Dev List to a Neutral Competent Entity
>
> Bitcoin is a global infrastructure development project where it would be
> politically awkward for any of the existing Bitcoin companies or orgs to
> host due to questions it would raise about perceived political control.
> For example, consider a bizarro parallel universe where MtGox was the
> inventor of Bitcoin, where they hosted its development infrastructure and
> dev list under their own name.  Even if what they published was 100%
> technically and ideologically equivalent to the Bitcoin we know in our
> dimension, most people wouldn't have trusted it merely due to appearances
> and it would have easily gone nowhere.
>
> I had a similar thought process last week when sidechains code was
> approaching release. Sidechains, like Bitcoin itself, are intended to be a
> generic piece of infrastructure (like ethernet?) that anyone can build upon
> and use.  We thought about Google Groups or existing orgs that already host
> various open source infrastructure discussion lists like the IETF or the
> Linux Foundation.  Google is too controversial in this community, and the
> IETF is seen as possibly too politically fractured.  The Linux Foundation
> hosts a bunch of infrastructure lists
> <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo> and it seems that
> nobody in the Open Source industry considers them to be particularly
> objectionable.  I talked with LF about the idea of hosting generic
> Bitcoin-related infrastructure development lists.  They agreed as OSS
> infrastructure dev is already within their charter, so early this week
> sidechains-dev list began hosting there.
>
> From the perspective of our community, for bitcoin-dev it seems like a
> great fit.  Why?  While they are interested in supporting general open
> source development, the LF has literally zero stake in this.  In addition
> to neutrality, they seem to be suitable as a competent host.  They have
> full-time sysadmins maintaining their infrastructure including the Mailman
> server. They are soon upgrading to Mailman 3
> <http://wiki.list.org/Mailman3>, which means mailing lists would benefit
> from the improved archive browser.  I am not personally familiar with
> HyperKitty, but the point here is they are a stable non-profit entity who
> will competently maintain and improve things like their Mailman deployment
> (a huge improvement over the stagnant Sourceforge).  It seems that LF would
> be competent, neutral place to host dev lists for the long-term.
>
> To be clear, this proposal is only about hosting the discussion list.  The
> LF would have no control over the Bitcoin Project, as no single entity
> should.
>
> Proposed Action Plan
>
>
>    -
>
>    Discuss this openly within this community.  Above is one example of a
>    great neutral and competent host.  If the technical leaders here can agree
>    to move to a particular neutral host then we do it.
>    -
>
>    Migration: The current list admins become the new list admins.  We
>    import the entire list archive into the new host's archives for user
>    convenience.
>    -
>
>    http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/  Kill bitcoin-list and
>    bitcoin-test.  Very few people actually use it.  Actually, let's delete the
>    entire Bitcoin Sourceforge project as its continued existence serves no
>    purpose and it only confuses people who find it.  By deletion, nobody has
>    to monitor it for a repeat of the Sept 2014 hacking incident
>    <https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4Mzg> or GIMP-type
>    hijacking <https://lwn.net/Articles/646118/>?
>    -
>
>    The toughest question would be the appropriateness of auto-importing
>    the subscriber list to another list server, as mass imports have a tendency
>    to upset people.
>
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Warren Togami
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Bitcoin-development at lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
>
>


-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/
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