The fork: Tony's take

[TonyBagnall]

hello

Markus recently deprecated sktime's pypi, and there is a lot of misleading and untrue information flying around about the split of the sktime into aeon and what Franz Kiraly retains control of. There is a long back story here which I do not want to go into. Nor do I wish to get into a row with the self proclaimed founder of sktime. However, I feel the need to spell out a brief version of events to counter some of the untrue and libellous accusations he has levelled at me. This is my personal take, I am not speaking for anyone else.

I used to be an owner of the github organisation github.com/sktime along with Franz Kiraly and Markus. GitHub organisations have a strange feature where one owner can, with a single click of a button, remove other owners and make themselves the sole owner. They also have a feature that allows the owner to ban an individual from any interaction with projects in the organisation. Dr. Kiraly instigated a move of the sktime code base from the Alan Turing institute github organisation (where it was first conceived) to github.com/sktime, which had previously just stored subprojects of sktime and documentation. Then, completely unilaterally and without consulting anyone, Dr. Kiraly took sole control of github.com/sktime and banned me and two others completely (I think it was October/November 2022).

When other core developers objected to this, he banned the rest of what he incorrectly refer to as “the splinter group”. This group includes three of the four community council members from summer 2022 and eight of the 14 core developers who were active in 2022 (the remainder of whom seem to have become inactive since we left). The ban means we cannot interact with the sktime code base in any way or even comment on an issue.

Sktime used to be affiliated numFOCUS. After I made a formal complaint about Dr. Kiraly's conduct through their code of conduct mechanism, they tried to mediate. They told Dr. Kiraly that he must reinstate myself and others banned before mediation could progress. He refused, and the result of my complaint about Dr. Kiraly was that the part of the sktime controlled by Dr. Kiraly became the first ever open source project to have numFOCUS affiliate status removed. Understandably, numFOCUS do not want to get further involved.

There is a lot else going on which I will not elaborate on in public. The plain fact is that after Dr. Kiraly unilaterally decided to ban us, we had no choice but to fork. I think we are all enjoying it more over here in a much more friendly and inclusive environment.

Markus is not involved with aeon. He is not affiliated with my employer or my research group. He started sktime with Dr. Kiraly, myself and Jason. He was the main developer up until fairly recently. He was fully aware of events leading to the fork and has I believe been in contact numerous times with people at numFOCUS. He set up the pypi for sktime and has always owned it on his personal account. Dr. Kiraly has paid a lawyer to send him a threatening letter, which Dr. Kiraly then published online. He is no doubt commissioning further bullying and threatening letters. As far as I understand it, the pypi belongs to, and has always belonged to, Markus and is his to do with as he sees fit. But that is his choice, I told him I would support him in whatever decision he made. I would note that Dr. Kiraly has not followed the standard procedures for conflict resolution with pypi https://pypi.org/help/

It has been a difficult time for everyone involved. Personally, I would like us all to move on and focus on developing excellent open source software.

Tony Bagnall