Wednesday 27 February 2013

Phil Daintree's shameless lies - Part 1

An introduction

This page is written in response to the lies that +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies.

As with anything I publish, anybody (except the Viagra  salesmen) can comment on my blog. I make a public commitment that I will not attempt to forge or censor any posts, as goes on in all the communication channels on webERP. If Phil Daintree wishes to dispute anything in this blog he is free to do so. If I am wrong I will alter my post. I trust in the common sense and intelligence of people to read the facts and to make up their own minds.

I thought I would do a series of posts on the libels that Phil Daintree has been putting around the web. I also believe he has been mailing them to anybody who he thinks will listen. There are too many to do in one post so I thought I would make a regular feature of it.

Phil Daintree has admitted to a number of people that he made the whole lot up as an attempt to discredit me, but it seems he is still desperately seeking to find someone to believe him.

Phil Daintree regularly states that I am a liar, but has never managed to find anything I have said that is untrue. A number of people have asked him for an example but he never replies. try it and see....

It's been a bit spooky being the subject of his hate campaign. Sometimes I have felt like I was playing Michael Douglas to his Sharon Stone. He has even been snooping around in the online lives my friends and colleagues, in his desperate attempts to find an example of where I have said something untrue.

The fact that he cannot find an example, despite the closeness of our working relationship over such a long time is a source of great pride to me.

I will state nothing here without backing it up with relevant links to the facts.

Lie number 1 - The reason and timing of his taking away my admin rights

Phil Daintree apparently claims that he withdrew my admin privileges because he didn't like my work on fixed assets (incidentally still in use at one of East Africa's major companies - they don't like his version it doesn't do what they require). This is just untrue.

The truth is Phil Daintree had his ego bruised when somebody agreed with me in a dispute over Purchase Order history being kept, in December 2010 as can be seen here: http://weberp-accounting.1478800.n4.nabble.com/Re-webERP-users-Bug-in-Planning-and-MRP-td3085185.html#a3085235.

I had been administering webERP right up until this date when Phil Daintree suddenly stated that he was withdrawing my admin access. This was the first time either publicly or privately he had mentioned my admin access. Only the day before I had been using my admin rights so the claim that he removed them in November is obviously one of his lies.

Lie number 2 - The purchase ordering system

Phil Daintree apparently then goes on to say that I didn't like his idea of keeping the purchasing conversion factor inside the order class. Phil Daintree has obviously forgotten that revision control systems have a long memory. As can be seen here I actually wrote the code and committed it here http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~tim-weberpafrica/web-erp/trunk/revision/4188 at 2011-01-09 12:27:33 UTC and then Phil Daintree copied my code and committed it here: https://sourceforge.net/p/web-erp/code/4463/#diff-5 on the following day.

So Phil Daintree "claims" I was against his idea and says: "Tim refused to accept my decision, rather than gracefully accepting it was a simple mistake and it was much more elegant to hold the units in the businesses unit of measure. A tirade of angry emails to the list ensued much more than a simple technical disagreement.". Now it turns out that he actually copied my work and claimed it as his own!! This theme of copying other peoples work and claiming it as his own carries on through much of the life of webERP.

The initial purchase ordering system that Phil Daintree initially claimed was "......really good - sorry it has taken me a while to recognise the large improvements you have effected in this area. I can't believe there has not been more excitement around this work. Although perhaps it is only crazy accountants that get excited about such things." (http://weberp-accounting.1478800.n4.nabble.com/Major-upgrade-to-purchasing-td1487909.html#a1487912) wasn't even written by me but by Rob Virgin, so why Phil Daintree thinks I would have behaved like he claims is yet another mystery!!

As Fahad points out here https://sourceforge.net/p/kwamoja/blog/2013/02/lies-damn-lies-and-phil-daintree/ little if anything Phil Daintree says turns out to be true, which is why he needs to so extensively use censorship in the webERP project.

Anyway, that is enough until Part 2  

Monday 4 February 2013

KwaMoja/webERP and me, the facts!

As with anything I publish, anybody (except the viagara  salesmen) can comment on my blog. I make a public commitment that I will not attempt to forge or censor any posts, as goes on in all the communication channels on webERP. If Phil Daintree wishes to dispute anything in this blog he is free to do so. If I am wrong I will alter my post. I trust in the common sense and intelligence of people to read the facts and to make up their own minds.

This is a post that I didn't really want to have to spend time writing. It is unfair that attention should be taken away from the hard work the guys on KwaMoja have put in, and this is why I have tried to remain silent on the matter. Also I want to concentrate on the code which is far more fun, and far more productive. However it has been brought to my attention that there is much misinformation on this subject that is being propagated on the web by people with their own agendas to push. So, for those reasons I feel I have to put right the facts regarding me, KwaMoja, and webERP.

KwaMoja grew from a series of lectures I gave at a community college in Kenya last year. As part of the course work I set the students to work on some modifications for webERP. Two of the students expressed an interest in continuing this work and doing their own version for Kenya. I had also about that time had an email from an Indian gentleman wanting to know if I wanted to do a fork. I put him in touch with my two students and that is how KwaMoja began. One of my reasons for setting up my company in Africa was always to help African programmers, so I was pleased to help them, and I have donated some code to them. I also leant them some money to purchase the domain name (after their .org domain name was taken by somebody trying to make mischief) and for hosting, which has since been repaid. However this doesn't diminish my commitment to webERP which is a project to which I have given thousands of hours and spent thousands of pounds in promoting over the years. Indeed a look at the recent commits here https://sourceforge.net/p/web-erp/code/commit_browser shows I am still a very active committer to webERP.

One of the things I love most about open source is being able to discuss interesting ideas with like minded people. Technical discussions are a very interesting way of reinforcing your views on a subject. It is a shame that these have been virtually banned on webERP and a pleasure to work with people on KwaMoja who are interested in discussions.

The short answer for those who don't want to read all the stuff above is that I am very committed to both KwaMoja and webERP and intend to keep donating my time and my code to both projects.