WDC-FTC joint projects
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Hello everybody, my name is Mario Blacutt and i am representing new Worldcoin committee.
After some debate we agreed to contact you because we want to propose our development teams to cooperate.
We see that this year you are focusing on core technology while we are focusing on user experience so we will make a complete refactor of the UI with a lot of interesting innovations.
Before some one screams ‘oohhh no UNOCS againnnn…’ , let me explain that what we are proposing is some technology exchange nothing more. As our wallets are very similar (except for Neo-Scrypt of course) this technology exchange is completely feasible and won’t require a lot of extra work.
So your wallet would benefit from our work and ours from your work. This can make our technical progress a lot faster, besides it would be ridiculous that we try to compete with each other at this instance while a potential extremely large market is awaiting us in the future that we can reach faster if we cooperate.
In order to be transparent, our current situtation is this:
Bad :
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We have lost a lot of supporters because of Scharmbeck (obviously)
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We will carry an stigma that will take some months of intense work to statrt reversing and recovering our damaged image
Good:
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None of Scharmbeck people is anyhow directly involved in the project
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We have a stable source of devs
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We have enough resources to live for the comming years so we don’t need to make a quick profit taking short term decisions
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Even with the horrendous crash we have a stable healthy relation with our biggest investors
The reason i am posting directly on the forum is because obviously for this to work, FTC support base must agree too.
If you need more detail on what technologies exactly we are planning or you want to ask absolutely anything please don’t hesitate to answer this thread and i will answer the best i can.
We think that there is no single piece of code that will ‘save’ our coins, we think that we need hundreds of pieces that will make us truly different and attractive to investors again so it will be faster if we cooperate.
We also understand that this thread could incite a lot of hate but i personally think it could be worth the risk.
Mario
PD: Please forgive me my bad English as it is not my native language
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Welcome to the forum. If it’s in the spirit of opensource, I’m sure nobody would have an issue with colaboration. I’d hope there is no hate directed to anyone, but I understand there is a troubled history here. I wasn’t around at the time, so perhaps members who were could fill in the gaps for people for the newer members.
Could you please tell us more about what you require from us and how we can help? From what I can gather from reading old posts, the issue with UNOCS was hype and lack of substance, could you perhaps offer insight into your views of UNOCS and it’s issues?
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Hi and welcome to our community.
I’d like to mirror mrwyrms comments about us being open to collaboration and that is the very nature of opensource and can’t see any reasons why we could not help each other.Obviously the UNOCS fiasco will be a stain on our two communities for a long time but smoothing over relations could help both of our coins who as you say are very similar. In fact I have cited similarities recently when discussing reasons for the price drop within Feathercoin.
Thank you for making this proposal
(again I was only around at the end of unocs so would be interested to hear the opinions of other team members.) -
Hi,
What exactly you want to cooperate on?
I mean it is all opensource.
Anybody can cooperate.
Cheers
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Interesting. I actually made the most $ off WDC of all the cryptos I have mined TBH…i don’t hold any currently but that can always change.
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Our github is here Clone it, fork it, make your changes and submit a pull request. :)
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I asked Kevlar his thoughts on the subject, since he was around and the time. I think he has some very valid points.
kevlar:
I was here for UNOCS and I’d love to fill you in on the gaps. It started with non-developers making plans to collaborate, and that should be all the more I need to say. What should have happened is the code should have been forked on github, and a pull request made. That’s how developers collaborate. They don’t get non-developers to announce publicly that they’re collaborating.
What they should have done is say, “Hey, I’m from Worldcoin, and I have this here pull request, I was wondering if anyone was interested in merging it.”
Or, if they’re working on something, “Hey, I’m from Worldcoin, and I’m working on this feature on this fork. Can anyone answer a question about this piece of code?” Or, “Does anyone have a good idea on how to solve this problem in code?”
The last thing a developer needs is a non-technical micro-managing middle man to go between him and another developer. And the idea that these things happen because some non-coders decide that it should has been proven over and over again to be exactly how it doesn’t work.
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Thanks for your answers !
About UNOCS, i didn’t have first hand information at that time (i am in the WDC committee since October 2014) but as kevlar said it seemed that it was about just good intentions from the managers at that time without any coordination with the developers.
I will clarify exactly what we are proposing.
First read this which is our plan for this year.
http://forum.worldcoin.global/index.php?/topic/66-wallet-refactor-project-2015/
As it is opensource of course your dev team could pull and adapt every thing they find interesting to FTC wallet so why they don’t do just that and incorporate a lot of interesting advancements in the wallet ?, the problem is that it takes a lot of time to test and integrate properly some work which it isn’t yours, the idea is that we would implement the framework and our work (if you find it interesting) directly in FTC github and it would be our responsibility to test and integrate correctly on FTC wallet. The same from your part, for example if you are planing to rebase FTC wallet to a newer BTC wallet, then do the work to our WDC too.
To be honest i am not really sure what are your developement plans for this year but once we catch up we obviously need to discuss what exactly we would implement in FTC wallet this year, and the same from your part so the work load is well balanced.
Of course there should be a public commitment to reach the milestones promised, even to impose some penalties if some party is affected from the delays of the other, if we don’t push ourselves hard we won’t
reach our goals.
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I don’t mean to act as a spiritual medium for Kevlar’s replies, but his feedback via slack is very interesting.
kevlar [2:45 PM]
Spoken like a true non-developer.kevlar [2:52 PM]
Let’s see. If the argument is to be believed, integration and testing is a lot of work. So what he’s suggesting is that we double the amount of work involved? So now if you do something for FTC, you ALSO have to do it for Worldcoin?kevlar [2:53 PM]
How exactly is that collaborating? That’s just “Do our work for us, and maybe we’ll do something for you” (edited)kevlar [2:54 PM]
Oh, and then we should punish each other when we miss arbitrarily imposed deadlines.kevlar [2:54 PM]
That’s rich.kevlar [2:56 PM]
I mean forget for one minute that that’s an INCREDIBLY dumb way to structure development. If you REALLY wanted to do that, you should make one code base which is just re-branded for both coins.kevlar [3:03 PM]
I can just hear his response, “Well that’s what we’re proposing.”Great. Build it, and let us know when it’s done. We can evaluate it then.
Want help building it? Start writing code and discussing your progress. Maybe someone will send you a pull request if they like what you’re doing.
That’s how developers collaborate.
I’m starting to think he’s correct. There is a correct and well established way for open source projects to function, and non developers like myself just get in the way.
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I am a developer but not in this context as I don’t seem to be able to find a use here for my skills. I think your right non developers may just be getting in the way.
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There is a time tested and well established method for developers to collaborate. Non developers interfacing between two developers is senseless.
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I don’t mean to act as a spiritual medium for Kevlar’s replies, but his feedback via slack is very interesting.
kevlar [2:45 PM]
Spoken like a true non-developer.kevlar [2:52 PM]
Let’s see. If the argument is to be believed, integration and testing is a lot of work. So what he’s suggesting is that we double the amount of work involved? So now if you do something for FTC, you ALSO have to do it for Worldcoin?kevlar [2:53 PM]
How exactly is that collaborating? That’s just “Do our work for us, and maybe we’ll do something for you” (edited)kevlar [2:54 PM]
Oh, and then we should punish each other when we miss arbitrarily imposed deadlines.kevlar [2:54 PM]
That’s rich.kevlar [2:56 PM]
I mean forget for one minute that that’s an INCREDIBLY dumb way to structure development. If you REALLY wanted to do that, you should make one code base which is just re-branded for both coins.kevlar [3:03 PM]
I can just hear his response, “Well that’s what we’re proposing.”Great. Build it, and let us know when it’s done. We can evaluate it then.
Want help building it? Start writing code and discussing your progress. Maybe someone will send you a pull request if they like what you’re doing.
That’s how developers collaborate.
I’m starting to think he’s correct. There is a correct and well established way for open source projects to function, and non developers like myself just get in the way.
I don’t know if our friend is a core FTC developer but it seems he has no experience with big software project management, so i will try to make it clearer :
Suppose that FTC dev team has a plan that interests us called product A, and we have plans to make another thing that looks interesting to you (see link in my first post ) … let’s call this product B.
The time invested from FTC dev team doing A and implementing B coupled with the time invested from our team implementing A and building B is a LOT BIGGER than FTC building A on both wallets coupled with the time WDC dev team building B on both wallets.
So it is NOT duplicating work , that’s the whole point.
95% coins have a rebranded wallet including FTC wallet which actually started as a rebranded LTC wallet, so i really don’t get the problem about it.
Another misconception … kevlar seems to believe that FTC has something that interests us now and we would like to leech it’s features now, well it doesn’t … we are not interested in neo scrypt, of course we would like to know the whole dev plan to define what exactly we would like to have ( some one please post a link to get more info :) )
I think a better argument would be: ‘we are not interested in what you are doing’ period, and that would be ok.
FTC and WDC are similar not equal which means that any pull from external source needs to be properly reviewed, tested and integrated which takes time, at least we don’t just type the ‘pull’ command with something we like and get done with it.
I don’t know were i said that we will define the ‘arbitrarily imposed deadlines’, this has to be negotitated of course but it wouldn’t make sense that one teams complies with commitments while the other don’t.
Overall I think it would have been a lot more useful if he just ask instead of ‘throwing jabs’ blindly, attacking doesn’t make someone smarter; if it is not clear our intention is not to attack FTC or it’s community or somehow hijack the work of their dev team.
Are there any official opinions about this ?
Even if we don’t reach an agreement it doesn’t hurt to have a good debate here and explore some ideas for the future won’t you guys agree ? :)
By the way kris_davison and MrWyrm you are doing a great job :)
thanks to other posters too
PD: i have developed an ERP solution in C++ and Qt in my country and i built a company around it so i can really say i have ‘some experience’ about software development topics
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To be more explicit for non developers :
The team that develops a module has lot knowledge that it is not shared in the source code. for example : what are the caveats ? known bugs ? what was well tested ? what wasn’t? upgrade path ? internal documentation ? api compatibility ? , etc etc etc …mmmmm … etc etc etc. All this knowledge is not transmitted directly in the code.
You don’t need to believe me, most open source companies ( all ? ) bases their revenue model on this fact alone, for example Red Hat , Suse, etc etc etc… have their core product built around open source technologies but they sell support because their knowledge is not transmitted directly in the source code.
Moral: it is extremely more efficient that the development team implements directly their module instead of a third party team.
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We don’t own our developers, they just contribute to our code. Any of our developers at any time could contribute their time towards any project. That’s up to them. There is nothing mandatory.
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Hi ! But is there a central plan or direction ? or anybody contributes in the area they want/like ?
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I don’t know if our friend is a core FTC developer but it seems he has no experience with big software project management, so i will try to make it clearer :
Not wishing to blow smoke up Kelvar’s arse, but that certainly isn’t true. We have had many heated debates on various subjects recently, he might be abrasive in his manner, but he’s anything but inexperienced.
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You can have a lot of experience developing software but it is different when you work with large programs, very different dynamic and a new set of problems arises; probably i misunderstood the comment, point taken anyway, i withdraw my previous comment :)
I see that we have different developing models, so i agree it couldn’t work the way i projected it. We shouldn’t close the door for future cooperation though, even in the marketing area we can make some joint campaigns. I will hang around if any one has questions or interest in future cooperation
Thanks !
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I’d welcome you to stick around, please don’t feel like we are not ‘coin friendly’, our door is always open, if there is every any feathercoin features you wish to port and have questions, please post back and I’m sure our Devs will assist where they can as I’m sure you would the same. I’d like to further add, the same offer stands for any coin without any form of ‘pre-agreed collaboration’ effort :)
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I think maybe its worth talking with lizhi as he seems to be one of a very small list of core wallet developers we have.
I work as a developer so I agree there are other ways of working than just pull requests. But as you can see I’m not sure how feasible they are for us right now. Lizhi is pretty flat out making changes but he is one of only a few devs here that could actually commit to doing what you have suggested.
Everything else is just talk.
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I’d welcome you to stick around, please don’t feel like we are not ‘coin friendly’, our door is always open, if there is every any feathercoin features you wish to port and have questions, please post back and I’m sure our Devs will assist where they can as I’m sure you would the same. I’d like to further add, the same offer stands for any coin without any form of ‘pre-agreed collaboration’ effort :)
Thanks! i extend the invitation for our forums too.
I think maybe its worth talking with lizhi as he seems to be one of a very small list of core wallet developers we have.
I work as a developer so I agree there are other ways of working than just pull requests. But as you can see I’m not sure how feasible they are for us right now. Lizhi is pretty flat out making changes but he is one of only a few devs here that could actually commit to doing what you have suggested.
Everything else is just talk.
Yeah, i would like to talk to Lizhi to see what he thinks about this.
In WDC we are sick of talking so we changed our model and now we more or less behave like a business with deadlines , pressure, we talk on daily basis . We will se in some months the results