On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:14 PM, Wladimir J. van der Laan <laanwj@gmail.com> wrote:

Like in any open source project there is lots of decision making ability for code changes. I'd say look at the changelog for e.g. 0.11 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/0.11/doc/release-notes.md#0110-change-log, or follow pull requests for a while, to see how many decisions about changes are made from day to day. No, I'm not sitting on my hands, and so is none of the other contributors that you'd like to get rid of.

The analogy goes further even. Even though I disagree with some of the changes you're making, I respect Mike's (and anyone's) right to make a fork of Bitcoin Core. That's how open source works: if people disagree with changes made or not made, they can maintain their own version. However:

 

Consensus changes are *much* more difficult, on the other hand. Even relatively straightforward softforks come with a long discussion process (see BIP62, BIP66). A hardfork is hard to do at the best of times (everyone needs to upgrade their software!), and simply not possible if almost the entire technical community disagrees with you.

Consensus changes - in particular hardforks - are not about making a change to the software. You are effectively asking users of the system to migrate to a new system. Perhaps one which is a philosophical successor to the old one, but a different system, with new rules that are incompatible with the old one.