[Project_owners] Project takeover request

[Charles Melhorn]

>> 1. I don't consider two hours a reasonable amount of time for responding 
>> to requests to transfer ownership of a project. I received an initial 
>> inquiry from the prospective new owner this morning, and two and a half 
>> hours later, I was informed that ownership of my project was being 
>> transferred. David was good about quickly halting this process once I 
>> replied, but by that time, extensive changes to the project web pages, 
>> source repository, and bugzilla had already been made. (David, if you 
>> could wave your administrator's wand and undo all those changes in one 
>> fell swoop, I'd appreciate it!).
>>   
>>     
> Numerous users tried to get a hold of you. I sent 3 emails and only
> after this last one you decided to answer.
>   

Scott, please try to consider this from my perspective. I have no record 
of your earlier correspondence, you didn't cc the mozdev.org 
administrators when you inquired about transferring ownership yesterday 
morning, and in the one place where this could be independently 
verified, the project mailing list, there were no posts from you 
until... again... yesterday.

There were, however, posts from me in January and February of this year, 
so even by the standards of your proposed adoption policy, my project 
wouldn't be considered abandoned. In those posts, I explained that 
updating the extension wasn't simply a matter of bumping the max version 
number in the install file and that a substantial investment of time 
would be required. The Link Fingerprints component is an example of 
this. The LF specification has changed since the previous release of 
MDHashTool - in fact, there was a lengthy discussion of link 
fingerprints on the dev-tech-network mailing list in May and June - and 
I prefer to resolve that issue before releasing a new version. There are 
also quality control concerns.

You disapprove of how I've maintained the project. That's fine, no need 
for the discussion to degenerate into a personal attack. Your 
dissatisfaction will undoubtedly spur you into creating something even 
better, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with.


> Charles, I'd like to publicly apologize about this.  I agree that a
>   

No worries, David. I appreciate all your efforts over the years...

I would add that if prospective fork owners want to ensure that old 
users find them, they should sprinkle their web pages with references to 
the original project and let Google do the rest. Or in this case, 
announce the new project on my mailing list.

Thanks,

Charles