User talk:David McBride

Tahoe-LAFS

What I found in the AfDs was a lot of crosslinking between Zooko's bio, Zooko's Triangle, and Tahoe-LAFS (developed by Zooko). The sourcing is certainly poor. So I'm a little concerned that we have a circular notability issue (which is something you alluded to in your AfD comment): "X is notable because Y developed it using principle Z." From my viewpoint, all three of those things must be independently notable to comply with WP:NOTINHERITED, and not even the sourcing that is there provides any basis for meeting WP:GNG. I may be boiling this dow2n considerably, but Tahoe-LAFS looks like one of many open-source projects that do the same thing (as the SAs in that article attest). Also, last time I checked, anyone could start an open-source project. So what I'm trying to figure out is exactly how widespread its use is, because I found nothing through regular channels (Scholar is not my usual test of notability when the topic is not indicated to be particular to that arena). Do you have a better idea of that? MSJapan (talk) 21:11, 7 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you're certainly asking reasonable questions. I'll see if I can help answer them. Bear in mind that I am not familiar with Wikipedia conventions; please excuse me if I make novice mistakes:

While Tahoe is one of a number of distributed storage systems, it is an area that is seeing rapid development, and a range of different designs which have different properties. The answers given to Question 1 on the Tahoe-LAFS FAQ may be helpful in understanding that while Ceph, Tahoe, GlusterFS, and several other tools all provide similar functionality at a high-level -- i.e, they store data in a scalable way -- they are each designed differently, and have different strengths and weaknesses owing to their respective designs.
I'd suggest that being in popular use is not the only way for Tahoe-LAFS to be notable; it can also be such by possessing novel, unique, useful characteristics not shared by competing designs.
Having skimmed WP:NOTINHERITED, I can see an argument that Zooko's bio could be eligible for deletion, because while the development of the Triangle concept in distributed naming, contributions to the ZRTP protocol design, and development of Tahoe-LAFS may be notable, that does not necessarily imply notability of the person. However, I'd suggest that each of these are non-trivial advances to the state-of-the-art, and thus is notable because he is the originator of those improvements.

I note that the RFC for ZRTP does explicitly credit Zooko as one of two supporting contributors to the design of the protocol, in addition to Phil Zimmerman. (See section 16, "Acknowledgements".) While a number of other authors are credited with assisting with the write-up of the specification of the protocol, it seems clear that Zooko had substantial involvement in its design.

While it is true that anyone can start an open-source project, achieving non-trivial sustained progress requires persistent effort on the parts of the developers. I'd suggest that, before dismissing an open-source project as not being of note, that it is important to both check (a) whether or not any significant development is still ongoing, and (b) whether it has yet achieved any significant output, such as a large body of functional code. If either of these is the case, then it may reasonably be argued that the project is notable as a result.

A meta-question: Should this discussion not be taking place on one of the AfD discussion pages?

I hope this helps! David McBride (talk) 22:50, 7 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]