The promise was made by a couple of devs at the conference. They weren't there with official Core decision making powers. Even if they do code the hard fork 2mb blocksize increase, there's no guarantee it will obtain "consensus" to be included in Core. Unlikely to reach consensus, making it a rather hollow promise.
luke JR did not sign the roundtable as Luke JR - 'eligius inventor and general programmer'.. he signed it as a 'bitcoin core contributor'.
Matt Corallo did not sign it as general programmer and bitcoin hobbyist.. he signed it as a 'bitcoin core contributor'.
PEter Todd did not sign it as general programmer and bitcoin hobbyist.. he signed it as a 'bitcoin core contributor'.
If they mislead anyone-- though they assure me they didn't-- that's on them, no one else-- doubly so because assurances were made to other contributors that no such thing would be done when concerns were raised in advance about the ethics of trying conspiring to set network rules in closed meetings. My prior exasperated comments were precisely because I think it's naive to think that whatever understanding there actually was at the time that it wouldn't be spun as something else-- exactly as you're doing.
As far as contributor it's true that they are-- but: Matt's last merged commit was December 13th (6 months ago), Peter Todd's last merged commit was Jan 31st (5 months ago), Luke's was Feb 27th (4 months ago). Valued though they are, these are not exactly the most active contributors (and to be complete, they do now all have recent pull requests open). Their signatures were accurate in any case-- anyone can be a contributor, it doesn't imply any particular authority... but nor did the subject of the agreement require any authority. Considering that the goalposts are shifting, -- now people suggesting that core has to accept whatever they propose (a promise they never could have made), or that this proposal has to come before SW... I don't know why they'd bother with it at all now. It seems clear to me that they're getting played.
I was thinking that it would be interesting to see 2 alts in the market (I am dead serious):
SegWit and Classic.
Then see which one gets the biggest hashrate. It would be interesting I think.
Problem is how miners will be motivated to open their old asics for this, I mean probably nobody will be interested to speculate on these alts, I maybe dead wrong though!
Opinions?
If "Classic" were to hardfork in any case, they could simply make it merged mined. When I heard the name I initially assume that was precisely what they were going to do-- make it into a spinoff with merge mining, and apply the deceptive "classic" moniker to try to privilege it as the original thing.